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A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

OR THE POLITICAL IDEALS OF 
THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES 



A 

HERITAGE o/ FREEDOM 

OR 

THE POLITICAL IDEALS OF THE 
ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES 



BY 
MATTHEW PAGE ANDREWS 

AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OP THE UNITED STATES." 

"BRIEF HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES." 

ETC. 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



^PR (3 1918 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 






to the distinguished political heir op 
Sir Edwin Sandys and Thomas Jefferson 

THE VISCOUNT BRYCE 

in addition TO THE OBLIGATION OWED BY 
ALL FOR HIS GREAT PUBLIC SERVICES, THE 
AUTHOR GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES HIS PER- 
SONAL INDEBTEDNESS FOR MANY KINDNESSES 



PREFACE 

FOR invaluable criticism, helpful suggestions, and 
generous encouragement in the preparation of 
these pages, the author is indebted not only to a num- 
ber of noted historians and scholars engaged in the 
two-fold work of research and interpretation, but 
also to men of liberal sympathies, broad interests, and 
extended contact with the affairs and peoples of 
many lands. 

—M. P. A. 



vii 



INTRODUCTION 

FOR more than a hundred years, the people of two 
great English-speaking nations in North America 
have faced each other on a border line of several 
thousand miles without the expenditure of a dollar on 
the construction of fortifications on land or warships 
on the Lakes as a protection or a menace to either 
country. 

In Europe, on the other hand, along a border line 
only one-thirtieth as long, two nations have spent, in 
fifty years, more than fifty times the amount of 
money that the United States invested in securing 
the 895,000 square miles of territory known as the 
Louisiana Purchase. 

This contrast illustrates the difference between a 
continuous peace and a constant menace or open 
conflict. Such a state of peace as that which has 
existed in America was not created by fiat; nor has 
it been the conception of mere dreamers. It is due 
to the fact that, in Canada and in the United States, 
the ideals of the two English-speaking peoples have 
been the same, and the governments have been re- 
sponsive to the will of two free and intelligent peo- 
ples who have come to think of each other only in 
terms of friendship. 

Despite these long-maintained amicable relations 

ix 



X INTRODUCTION 



with an important part of the British Commonwealth, 
the older American histories have, by their treatment 
of the Revolutionary conflict and the War of 1812, 
helped to create an active anti-British sentiment. 
They have elaborated upon the comparatively brief 
clashes with the British Government in a manner that 
is out of all proportion to the attention given to a 
period ten times as long of reciprocal good offices 
and of peaceful intercourse between the two nations. 
Against the former teachings that, in 1776, the 
Americans were a united people struggling against 
unmitigated oppression and tyranny, the historian of 
to-day shows how the separation of the two great 
branches of the English-speaking peoples was the re- 
sult of an armed conflict between the then autocratic 
and unpopular government of Great Britain under 
George III on the one side and an active patriot party 
representing about a third of the people of the British 
colonies in America on the other. 

This new history would also make it clear that 
the patriot party in America succeeded in establish- 
ing an independent government, not solely by force 
of arms but also by reason of the fact that the aggres- 
sive acts of the personal government of George III 
were opposed by the same sort of people in England 
that had set up the standards of liberty in America. 
The sympathies of the English people were not with 
the war waged by a minority ministry in Britain, 
but rather with the principles and ideals of their 
fellow countrymen of the patriot party in America. 

The blundering government of George III fell, 



INTRODUCTION XI 



therefore, before the armed opposition in America 
and the political opposition at home. The American 
Eevolution had, in like manner, a double result — it 
secured the self-government of the revolted colonies 
in America, on the one hand, and the final overthrow 
of royal rule in the mother country, on the other. In 
America, George Washington soon became known as 
the ''Father of his Country"; but he was later ac- 
claimed in the British Parliament as the * ' Founder of 
the British Commonwealth, ' ' which now comprises the 
British Isles, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New 
Zealand, and South Africa. The present union be- 
tween these five colonial offshoots and the mother 
country represents, in actual practice, Thomas Jeffer- 
son's expressed theory of what such a union should 
be; for, in the original draft of the Declaration of 
Independence, Jefferson wrote: *'We have reminded 
them [the British] of the circumstances of our emi- 
gration and settlement here . . . that these were ef- 
fected at the expense of our own blood and treasure, 
unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great 
Britain [the Crown and Government]. That in con- 
stituting indeed our several forms of government, we 
had adopted one common king, therelij laying a 
foundation for perpetual league and amity with 
them; hut that submission to their Parliament was no 
part of our constitution." Had these facts been rec- 
ognised by the British Government, Jefferson con- 
tinued: ^^We might have heen a free amd a great 
people together." * 

*See quotation from statement of Edward Eider, made in 
1623, page 20. 



Xll INTRODUCTION 



It is well known that political misunderstandings 
lead to war; but it is not generally realised that his- 
torical misconceptions are equally dangerous to the | 
peace of nations. Especially is this true if these mis- 
conceptions keep alive an unreasonable distrust of a 
friendly nation. The maintenance of such distrust is 
illustrated by a review of our generally accepted treat- 
ment of Anglo-American relations; yet it is easily 
demonstrable that, for a period of one hundred years, 
the increasingly liberal British government has been 
the most powerful external support of Pan-American 
democracy. Since the War of 1812, many serious 
difficulties which have arisen between Great Britain 
and the United States have been settled by arbitra- 
tion, in sharp contrast with the methods in vogue be- 
tween other great Powers. When these disputes were 
decided to the disadvantage of Great Britain, the de- 
cisions were accepted with good grace. In other 
instances, Britain has, without arbitration, yielded to 
America the points at issue. As far as the actual 
results are concerned, it is quite beside the point 
whether the motives of the British government have 
been altruistic or wholly selfish; but it seems clear 
that the far-flung British Commonwealth has been the 
natural ally of America in the cause of freedom and 
peace. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Founding of Democracy in America 17 

Beginnings of Anglo-American Democracy ... 26 

The Progress of Democracy in Britain and 

Colonial America . 34 

Autocracy Severs the Bonds of Political Union 47 

Origin of Political Misunderstanding in His- 
torical Misconceptions .53 

The Dawn of Anglo-American Peace 58 

Anglo-American Democracy Confronts the Forces 

OF Pan-European Autocracy 62 

A Century of Anglo-American Disagreements 

Settled by Discussion and Arbitration ... 70 

Bibliographical Suggestions 97 

Appendix 101 

Index • 105 



xui 



A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 



A HERITAGE OF 
FREEDOM 

Founding of Democracy in America 

AFTER James, King of Scotland, had been pro- 
claimed King of England in 1603, he entered 
London by way of Aldersgate. A few years later, 
this despotically inclined ruler declared his intention 
to memorialise Aldersgate as the point where his 
Royal Highness entered the English capital. Auto- 
cratic rulers had preceded James on the English 
throne, but none of them had held the office of king 
in such high repute and the rights of the people in 
such disdain. In short, James I insisted that since 
he was a ruler by divine authority, he could not be 
held accountable to or by the people. 

He caused, therefore, to be put in high relief upon 
the memorial arch the sculptured figure of himself 
in royal robes. Desiring, also, to lay emphasis upon 
the theory of the ** divine right of kings,'' he se- 
lected appropriate passages from the Old Testament 
for inscription on the historic arch under which he 
had passed. On the east side he caused to be writ- 
ten; ''Then shall enter into the gates of this city 

17 



18 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

Kings and Princes. ' ' On the west side he inscribed : 
"And Samuel said unto all Israel, Behold, I have 
hearkened unto your voice in all that you have said 
unto me, and have made a KING over you."* 

It was a strange twist of fate that within a stone's 
cast of the Aldersgate arch there should have then 
been standing the house of Sir Edwin Sandys, who 
was destined to establish, in defiance of the British 
King and Spanish intrigue, the principles of repre- 
sentative democracy in the New World. While the 
royal arch was under construction, there gathered in 
this house, from time to time, a number of the choicest 
spirits of the Elizabethan Age. As James I sought to 
strengthen the bonds of autocracy, Sir Edwin Sandys 
and his group of English patriots met together to 
devise a way of breaking those bonds and thereby 
setting the people free. Sandys and his associates 
were the forerunners of the English and American pa- 
triots and statesmen, such as Hampden, Pym, Crom- 
well, Pitt, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madi- 
son. 

Since it seemed that democracy could not then be 
established in the Old World, Sir Edwin and his 
associates determined to attempt it in the New. As 
this great apostle of liberty looked out of his win- 

* Cf. * ' Here my grandfather again, by his own right, set the 
Prussian crown upon Ms head, once more distinctly emphasis- 
ing the fact that it was accorded him by the will of God alone 
. . . and that he looked upon himself as the chosen instrument 
of heaven. . . . LooMng upon myself as the instrument of the 
Lord, without regard to the opinions and intentions of the day, 
I go my way.'' 

^—^rom speech of William II at Koenigsl>erg^ August 25, 1910, 



FOUNDING OF DEMOCEACY IN AMERICA 19 

dows upon the Gate through which the self-willed 
autocrat had entered, his imagination must have pic- 
tured a free people going forth from it who should 
carry with them principles of political progress, 
popular enlightenment, and religious liberty. Brav- 
ing, therefore, the dungeon cell and the executioner's 
axe, he deliberately planned what now seems to have 
been the ** Greatest Political Experiment op the 
Ages.*' 

The name and fame of Sandys have been obscured 
through the ruthless attacks of a vindictive autocrat 
and his licensed historians; for James I began to 
realise, just too late, that Sandys had prepared a very 
definite plan for the subversion of autocratic rule. 
No wonder, then, that James afterwards referred to 
Sir Edwin as *'our greatest enemy," and a ''crafty 
man with ambitious designs." In spite, however, of 
almost insuperable obstacles and opposition, Sandys 
lived to see the success of his Great Experiment in 
the establishment of that Anglo-American democracy 
which was to overthrow the personal rule of the last 
of the British autocrats and profoundly affect the 
destinies of nations. 

The remodeling of Aldersgate, dedicated to the 
divine origin of autocracy, was soon completed. In 
1607, however, a colony of Englishmen was perma- 
nently settled at Jamestown; and, in 1609, and again 
in 1612, the most important events in the beginnings 
of America took place, when charters for the self- 
government of the colony were secured from the King 
by Sandys and his associates. These charters blazed 



20 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

the trail over which were to pass the political liber- 
ties of thirteen self -governing colonies. 

Contrary to Spanish, Portuguese, and French prec- 
edents in colonisation, the British Crown was not 
called upon to support the first Anglo-American set- 
tlement with money or other means of subsistence. 
Had the Crown borne this expense, James I would 
have had better grounds for absolute control of the 
settlement; but the providing of men, money, and 
equipment was undertaken by a group of English- 
men incorporated into what was known as the Lon- 
don or Virginia Company. This group was not im- 
mediately able to secure for the colonists anything 
better than the King's form of government; but the 
settlers themselves, under the leadership of Captains 
Ratcliffe, Archer, Martin, and others, bestirred them- 
selves to introduce popular reform in that government 
from the beginning ; and it was Captain Archer who, 
a few months after the first landing, proposed the 
calling of a colonial parliament with a view to over- 
turning the *'Soveraigne rule'' set up by Captain 
John Smith as the appointee of King James. In 
1609, Ratcliffe and Archer, taking with them **a 
breath of the free air of Virginia," visited England 
and aided the liberal spirits of the mother country 
to secure the Great Charter which definitely estab- 
lished the beginnings of popular government in 
America.* 

* Edward Eider, a member of the patriot party and of the 
Virginia Company, wrote, as early as 1623: 

''There is a material difference between the Spanish and 
English plantations. For the Spanish colonies were founded by 



FOUNDING OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 21 

Under James I a menacing absolutism was casting 
its shadow upon Church and State. Liberty-loving 
Englishmen began to fear the overthrow of such popu- 
lar rights as had been wrung from their former rul- 
ers. It was then that their thoughts turned to the 
New World, and they ''laid hold on this expectation 
of Virginia as a providence cast before them of two- 
fold advantage, ' ' — of escaping the intolerable tyranny 
of autocratic rule and of creating a "more free" 
government in America. Besides religious controver- 
sies, which were aggravated by James I, and the con- 
stant political controversies between King and Par- 
liament, which were to culminate in the temporary 
overthrow of the monarchy thirty years later, there 
were controversies with Spain. The Spanish had, 
from the first, protested against English settlement 
in the New World; they had already seized one ves- 
sel on the way to Jamestown; and it is interesting 
to note that the chairman of the ** Committee on 
Spanish wrongs" in Parliament was Sir Edwin 
Sandys. 

At this time, also, there was gradually developing 
a more or less secret "Court Party," working in sym- 
pathy with the autocratic ideas of the King of Spain, 
to which was opposed what may be called the "Pa- 
triot Party," working for the advancement of liberal 
principles of government. James I and Philip III 

the Icings of Spain out of their own treasury and revenues, and 
they maintain the garrisons there, together with a large Navy 
for their use and defence; whereas, the English plantations 
had been first settled and since supported at the charge of 
private adventurers and planters.*^ 



22 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

were equally interested in suppressing the freedom 
of their peoples. Liberty had made some progress in 
England, but almost none in Spain; yet it is a 
curious coincidence that Philip, the autocrat of Spain, 
was, in effect, obliged to recognise the independence 
of the Netherlands in the same year that the auto- 
cratic James was forced to grant the Great Charter 
to Anglo-American democracy in order to preserve 
English settlement in the New World. The year 
1609, therefore, witnessed: (1) the grant of the 
First Charter of self-government in America; (2) 
the liberation of the Netherlands from Spanish ty- 
ranny; and, (3) the assured opening in that coun- 
try of an asylum for the '^ Pilgrims," who were, in 
1620, to found the second free English settlement in 
North America. 

The Charter of 1609 was drafted by Sir Edwin 
Sandys and prepared for the signature of the King 
by Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Henry Hobart. The 
instrument provided for the Jamestown colonists pre- 
rogatives and privileges of government which had not 
been secured by Englishmen in the mother country. 
However discreetly, in the immediate presence of the 
autocratic King, they may have disguised their pur- 
poses in their official papers and petitions, the Patriot 
Party proposed nothing less than ^'to erect a free 
popular State," — a republic whose inhabitants were 
to have ^^no government putt upon them 'but hy 
their own consente." * 

* Cf. ' ' Governments are instituted among men, deriving their 
just powers from the consent of the governed. ' ' — Declaration of 



FOUNDING OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 23 



The ''new history" that has recently become the 
subject of much discussion represents a new in- 
terpretation of an old subject. This new interpreta- 
tion would subordinate the extravaganzas of kings 
and princes, with their court favourites and personal 
adventures. In short, it endeavours to tell more of 
the history of the people, of social reforms, and of 
the development of political principles. Such an in- 
terpretation should henceforth be applied to the be- 
ginnings of America. By far the greater part of 
our accustomed narrative of the first Anglo-American 
settlement has concerned itself with the figure of 
King James I; the personal adventures of Captain 
John Smith, as told by him ; and the story of Poca- 
hontas. We have, consequently, been following a 
shadow and have missed the substance. The romance 
of a great reform movement in the midst of a re- 
markable period of transition in British politics 
should be unfolded as we learn to appreciate the 
heroic figures of men who risked their lives and for- 
tunes in the planting and the cultivation of represen- 
tative democracy in the distant ''wilderness" of 
North America. Sir Edwin Sandys led the forces of 
English democracy to a triumph of far greater im- 
port than the more spectacular achievement of Wil- 
liam the Silent in the liberation of the Netherlands. 
For three hundred years it has been a travesty on 
the truth of history for Americans to bear laurels to 

Independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote also, even though he 
did not then have at hand the hidden records of the Patriot 
Party: "The tall of the Bevolution received its first impulse, 
not from the actors in that event, hut from the first colonists.'* 



24 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

the shrine of John Smith, who traduced or belittled 
the Patriot Party of England and America, rather 
than to the grave of Edwin Sandys, the leading spirit 
among the Founders of liberty in America. 

Among the associates of this inspired Englishman 
were numbered nearly all the great independent 
spirits of the Elizabethan Age. For example, there 
may be mentioned as friends of Sandys, or in sym- 
pathy with his ideals : Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Philip 
Sidney, William Shakespeare, the Earls of Lincoln, 
Pembroke, and Exeter, Lord De la Warr, Sir Oliver 
Cromwell, Sir Dudley Digges, and Henry and 
Thomas Wriothesly, Earls of Southampton, who, 
with John and Nicholas Ferrar, secretly preserved 
many of the records which James I sought to sup- 
press, and in which we now are beginning to find the 
faithful history of the truly revolutionary purposes 
of the Founders of America.* 

After the First Charter of American democracy 
had been secured, the liberal spirits in the manage- 
ment of the colony sought to make America a refuge 
for the oppressed. Puritans and *' Pilgrims'' were 
offered the freedom in Virginia which they had begun 
to seek in the Netherlands. Many accepted, and 
more would have availed themselves of the offer had 
not the royally appointed officials of the English 
Church interfered in the movement. The lamp of 
liberty had been lighted in the New World to be 

* Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, was also the noble 
patron of Shakespeare to whom the latter dedicated much of 
his work. Southampton was, perhaps^ second only to Sandys in 
founding democracy in America. 



FOUNDING OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 25 



kept burning as long as human freedom is destined 

to exist. 

The fleet that bore the Sandys Charter set sail for 
America on June 12, 1609. On the way, it encoun- 
tered the storm which has been immortalised by 
Shakespeare in The Tempest. The charter ship, 
which was well-named The Sea Adventure, was 
wrecked off the coast of "the still vex'd Bermoothes"; 
but the document and its bearers were saved while the 
other vessels of the fleet rode the storm in safety and 
reached their destination. Governor Gates, Admiral 
Somers, and their men supported themselves on wild 
game and fruits until they had constructed two 
small ships, which they named the Deliverance and 
the Patience, in which they set sail for Virginia.* 

*The Deliverance and tlie Patience were the first vessels built 
in the New World by Eng^lish settlers. In The Tempest, 
Shakespeare, the friend of Sandys and the Earl of Southamp- 
ton, depicts Ariel as a soul seeking liberty. Prince Ferdinand 
may be likened to the spirit of British democracy that finds its 
mate in Miranda, the virgin bride, America. 



Beginnings op Anglo-American Democracy 

When, on June 2, 1610, Gates arrived at James- 
town and assumed the government of the colony un- 
der the First Charter of our liberties, he did so on 
the anniversary of the royal grant of that Charter. 
Captain George Percy, of the original colonists of 
1607, gave place to Gates and the new popular gov- 
ernment was formally inaugurated in a solemn cere- 
monial. James I had selected the scriptural quota- 
tion for the royal arch at Aldersgate ; but the Rever- 
end Richard Buck, the minister of the colony in the 
New World, preached for the people from the truly 
prophetic text : ''Now the Lord had said unto Abram, 
Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, 
and from thy father's house, unto a land that I 
will shew thee. And I will make of thee a great 
nation . . . and in thee shall all families of the 
earth be blessed. ' ' * 

There were present on this epochal occasion about 
sixty of the earlier emigrants, including such sturdy 
English seamen and settlers as Captains George 
Percy, Daniel Tucker, Nathaniel Powell, and John 
Martin, the last of whom long outlived his com- 
patriots as the most prosperous colonist of the first 

* The following lines are the first and tenth stanzas of a poem 
on the first voyage written by Michael Drayton, England's 
patriot-poet of the day and occasion. Drayton was born near 

26 



ANGLO-AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 27 

emigrants. Among the new arrivals were Captain 
George Yeardley and his ''Company of old Soldiers 
trained up in the Netherlands/' — a connecting link 
between the newly established freedom of the Dutch 
people and the beginnings of self-government on the 
part of the English in America. John Rolfe and 
Pocahontas were there, and it is of special interest 
to know that among those who must have watched 
proceedings with an interest fraught with moment 
to the expansion of Anglo-American liberty, was 
Stephen Hopkins, afterwards one of the Pilgrim emi- 
grants and the father of Oceanus Hopkins, born on 
board the Mayflower in 1620. 

The accidental discovery of the Bermudas 
''through tempest and shipwrack" led the Virginia 
Company to seize the occasion to apply for a new 
charter for the Jamestown colony, ostensibly to pro- 
vide for the inclusion of the "new islands," but 
chiefly to extend the principles of self-government. 
This charter also was drafted by that great Founder 

the birthplace of Shakespeare, and his tomb is near those of 
Chaucer and Spenser. 

You brave heroique minds, 

Worthy your countries name, 
That honour still pursue, 
Goe, and subdue, 
Whilst loyt'ring hinds 

Lurk here at home with shame. . . . 

And in regions f arre. 

Such heroes bring yee foorth 

As those from whom we came; 
And plant our name 
Under that starre 

Not knowne unto our north. 



28 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 



of American democracy, Sir Edwin Sandys, and it 
too was drawn up by Sir Francis Bacon and Sir 
Henry Hobart. The preliminary petition to this 
charter was presented shortly after the return of 
Governor Gates to England in September, 1610 ; but 
the opposition of the Court, or Autocratic, Party, as- 
sisted by the machinations of the Spanish ambassa- 
dors, had begun to develop. Disguise it as they 
might, the entire plan of the patriot leaders was be- 
coming more and more evident. Consequently, the 
second charter of Anglo-American democracy was not 
wrung from the reluctant James until March, 1612.* 
The charter of 1612 not only extended the privi- 
leges of the colonists in America, but it cleared the 
way for the establishment in larger communities of 
representative democracyy the practice of which has i 

*In the same year appeared Captain John Smithes *'True 
^Relation" of Virginia and one year later a publication on the 
colony by the Reverend Samuel Purchas. These accounts of the 
Jamestown colonists were very unfavourable to the Patriot 
'Party in both countries. They were approved, however, by the 
king; and thereafter royal opposition to the Virginia Com- 
pany became increasingly bitter until that corporation was 
dissolved by royal mandate in 1624. No printed refutation of 
these volumes could be offered; for such a publication would 
not pass the royal censorship. Not only was the Patriot Party 
compelled to labour under this disadvantage, but its records 
were afterwards seized and destroyed, as far as possible, by the 
officers of the Crown. 

No one with intelligence and the ''rare gift of common 
sense'* can place much confidence in the unsupported narrative 
of Captain John Smith, in view of the fact that so large a 
proportion of his narrative is patently false. Dr. J. Franklin 
Jameson has correctly summarised the evidence as follows: 
*' Smith's narrative is a remarlcable historical mosaic, of which 
it may almost be said that what is historical is not his, and 
what is his is not historical" — History of Historical Writing 
m America, 



ANGLO-AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 29 

since been exercised in safety and with success by 
liberty-loving and highly developed peoples. Conse- 
quently, in August, 1619, the first representative as- 
sembly of free men met at Jamestown on American 
soil and took a forward step in self-government which 
was to prepare the way for the English colonies that 
were to follow and for the nation that was yet to be. 
In England, however, the forces working in behalf 
of freedom were not strong enough to withstand the 
now thoroughly aroused jealousy of an autocratic 
king and his court. Furthermore, the fears of James 
I were aggravated by the emissaries of Spanish au- 
tocracy. Under the direction of Count Gondomar, 
ambassador from Spain, spies were set to watch the 
proceedings of the Virginia Company. These re- 
ported to the English King, through the wily Gon- 
domar, that ^Uhe Virginia Court in London would 
prove a seminary for a seditious Parliament,^' and 
James had already had much trouble with parlia- 
ment. The king, therefore, became fully persuaded 
that the matter of government for America, as well 
as Britain, *'was too high and great for private men 
to manage.'' For that reason he considered that it 
was time to take the business into his own hands and 
*' govern it'' both in England and America *' ac- 
cording to his will and pleasure. ' ' * 

* * * Ourself, ' ' the king announced in a letter to parliament, 
"will make it our worh to settle the quiet and welfare of the 
plantations.*' At about this time, James I felt compelled to 
write A Premonition to All Most Mighty Monarchs. In 1616, 
he wrote A Remonstrance of the Most Gratious King James I 
for the Bight of Kings and the Independence of their Crownes. 
He later ordered the suppression of A Game at Chess, Thomas 



30 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

In accordance with this determination, James I set 
about devising plausible excuses for accomplishing 
the dissolution of the Virginia or London Company. 
First, he issued instructions for the preparation of 
further discreditable publications concerning the 
management and conduct of the colony.* He then 
appointed a Commission to make inquiry into the 
**true estate" of Virginia and gave that body to 
understand the nature of the verdict he would be 
pleased to receive. Accordingly, after visiting 
Jamestown, the Commission returned a very unfavour- 
able report as to the management of the Virginia 
Company and Colony, which furnished the King with 
what he considered sufficient cause ^^to reduce that 
popular form [of government] so as to make it agree 
with the monarchial form which was held in the rest 
of his Boy all Monarchic/^ 

Middleton's allegorical satire on the Spanish Court Party, 
which was acted at the Globe Theatre in 1623 amid much popu- 
lar applause. 

Just as the proclamations of James I with regard to the 
divine right of kings closely resemble the imperial promulga- 
tions of William II of Germany (Cf. p. 18 footnote), the secret 
work of Gondomar in England resembles that of Count Luxburg 
in Argentina, three hundred years later. Gondomar, however, 
while working secretly to injure the English people at the very 
time he was openly professing cordial friendship for them, does 
not seem to have suggested the sinking of English ships ' ^ with- 
out a trace.'' **Spurlos versenM" was reserved for expres- 
sion by a later representative of autocracy. 

* Cf . Nathaniel Butler 's * ' The TJnmasTcing of Virginia. * ' 
This pamphlet, full of unmerited abuse for the Patriot Party in 
England and the Colonists in America, was an additional con- 
tribution to the '' twisting of the evidence" in the writings of 
Captain John Smith and Samuel Purchas, published in 1612 and 
1613. 



ANGLO-AMEKICAN DEMOCRACY 31 

Under pretence of '^princelye" liberality towards 
his dutiful but erring subjects, James offered the 
Virginia Company an autocratic * ' compromise. ' ' This 
''compromise" gave the appearance of popular con- 
trol of the ''Virginia business© " through the ap- 
pointment of Commissioners in England and America 
to direct the affairs of the Colony. It also made pro- 
vision to guarantee the investments of the contrihiH- 
tors to the stock of the Coifnpcmy. In this latter 
offer lay the supreme test of the patriotism of the 
Founders of Anglo-American democracy. It would 
have been comparatively easy to argue, to the satis- 
faction of less noble spirits, that the acceptance of 
this "compromise" was better than the otherwise 
certain dissolution of the Company; for it seems al- 
ways harder to live and give one's all to one's coun- 
try than to die for it. But these English patriots 
did not hesitate in their choice. It was a matter of 
principle with them, and they chose to sacrifice their 
fortunes in order to establish free government in 
America, just as their political successors, the patriot 
leaders of the American Revolution, were ready, one 
hundred and fifty years later, to risk their all for the 
preservation of self-government. 

The members of the Virginia Company must have 
fully understood that the rejection of the King's 
"compromise" would mean the loss of their invest- 
ments, while its acceptance would secure them. 
Nevertheless, the vote on the royal "compromise" 
showed "but nine hands" in favour of it, while the 
remainder of the seventy members then voting op- 



32 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

posed it; so that, by the same token, they stood to- 
gether in unshaken devotion to the maintenance of 
liberal institutions in America and the rights of 
English citizens at home. The vote of the Company 
was taken on the 23rd of October, 1623, and this 
popular opposition to the King's expressed purpose 
was voiced in spite of the intimidation he had previ- 
ously attempted in the arbitrary arrest and imprison- 
ment of several of the highest officials of the Com- 
pany. The Company appealed for protection and re- 
dress to James's fourth Parliament in May, 1624; 
but, despite "soft mutterings" of protest heard in 
that body, the royal mandate that the petition be not 
considered was obeyed and the Virginia Company 
was left to its fate.* 

The corporate existence of the Virginia or London 
Company may be said to have ended with the ''quo 
warranto'^ of Attorney- General Coventry, which 
came up on the 26th of June, 1624. Nevertheless, 
Sir Edwin Sandys and his fellow patriots had ac- 
complished their great purpose, and the principles 

* During much of the time that James I was attempting to 
get control of the Virginia Company, Sandys and Southamp- 
ton were illegally held in confinement by orders of the King. 
In 1621, Sandys and Southampton had been placed under ar- 
rest by royal authority. Southampton was a member of the 
House of Lords and Sandys of the House of Commons. The 
latter body, on the 30th of November, 1621, under motion of 
Mr. Mallory, had it tersely recorded in the Commons Journal 
that the House "misseth Sir Edwin Sandys. Moveth we may 
Tcnow what is hecome of him." On the 11th of December, the 
House appointed a Committee to go to the home of Sandys in 
Kent where he was then confined by royal mandate, to ''see 
what state Sir Edwin Sandys is in, and if he is sicTc, indeed, to 
return his answer/' 



ANGLO-AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 33 

of self-government were then established in America, 
not only at Jamestown but also at Plymouth Rock. 
In Britain, the ''soft mutterings'' of the English 
Parliament over the interference of James I with the 
liberties of Englishmen became, in 1642, the rumble 
of open rebellion against Charles I. 



The Progress op Democracy in Britain ani> Colo- 
nial America 

In the development of Anglo-American democracy, 
the freedom of one country has ever acted and re- 
acted upon the growth of liberty in the other; and 
this law has held good, without real interruption, in 
colonial union, in open conflict, in mutual independ- 
ence, and, finally, in the culmination of a practical 
alliance in 1917 against an alien autocracy reaching 
out for world dominion. Because of the falsifications 
of such writers as John Smith, Samuel Purchas, and 
Nathaniel Butler, the character, courage, and abili- 
ties of the colonists at Jamestown and the purposes 
of the Patriot Party in England have been much 
misunderstood. On the other hand, only a portion of 
the true history of the activities of this Party, as 
given in their records, has been published, and that 
recently. The deliberate planning, under every 
imaginable difficulty and danger, of the ''Patriots, 
.Lords, Knights, gentlemen, marchants, and others" 
provided for the Virginia settlement a representative 
form of government; and the fact that this first 
colony was established by these Englishmen for po- 
litical reasons rather than for religious ones should 
materially enhance the importance of its narrative, 
in view of the now generally accepted separation, in 

34 



THE PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY 35 

liberal governments, of tlie functions of Church and 
State. 

That she blazed the way for the fullest develop- 
ment of representative democracy throughout the 
world may well be the proudest boast of America. 
It must ever be remembered, however, that the spirit 
of this democracy did not spring from American soil 
but that its earliest growth was in England. Trans- 
planted in America, it flourished on virgin soil, as it 
could not then grow in the Old World. On the part 
of the settlers themselves, the expansion of the prin- 
ciples of freedom in America may find figurative 
comparison with the ' ' parable of the talents, ' ' wherein 
he who was entrusted with the ''five talents" went 
"straightway" and traded with the same and doubled 
his holdings. When the first permanent English 
colonists landed at Jamestown in 1607 — a place and 
time, with regard to the political progress of man- 
kind, more momentous than the landing of the great 
Columbus at San Salvador — they brought with them 
the memory of each struggle for popular rights al- 
ready won or, perhaps, temporarily lost in the mother 
country. 

So insistent was the longing for liberty in the Eng- 
lish people that they persevered in the first work of 
colonisation despite the discouragement of a far 
worse-than-war death rate. This mortality was due 
chiefly to malarial fever found in the unaccustomed 
lowlands of the James river, to the importation of the 
Great Plague then raging in England, and to the 



36 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

yellow fever which was frequently contracted in the 
semi-tropical islands visited on the way over. This 
death rate ran from twenty per cent among the set- 
tlers who reached more healthful spots to upwards 
of ninety per cent of the other colonists who faced a 
combination of these ills and of Indian massacres as 
well. Since gold and other valuable minerals were 
not then found in Virginia, nothing less than a high 
moral motive could have animated the settlers and 
held their patriot supporters to the great task they 
had set for themselves. Captain John Smith, the first 
royally licensed historian of the colony, expanded 
upon the sufferings of the colonists, but attributed 
them almost wholly to the alleged mismanagement of 
its founders and to its popular form of government.^ 

* It was more or less natural that James I should attempt 
absolute control of his subjects in America through his 
duly appointed agents. For over a century, the rulers and 
grandees of Spain and Portugal had been enriching themselves 
through the exploitation of their own colonists as well as of 
the native Indians. Almost at the spot where the Jamestown 
colony landed, the Spanish had attempted a much larger 
colony. It was abandoned probably more from the failure to 
find gold and silver than for other reasons, such as the fierce 
hostility of the Indians, together with a climate much more 
rigorous than that of the Spanish colonies farther South. 
Like the Spaniards, James wanted gold ; and his agent, John 
Smith, sought diligently for it. The Virginia colonists and 
their supporters also hoped for gold, but they realised that they 
could secure something in the New World infinitely more 
precious than gold — a larger measure of liberty than they had 
ever had before. This became the expanding inheritance of 
the "five talents" of the British colonists, 'Halents'^ which 
were not entrusted to the less fortunate emigrants from Spain, 
Portugal, and France. 

Smith, as the servant of the king, represented that all went 
well with Virginia when the king's plans were administered 
by Smith himself, and that the settlers had always dismally 



THE PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY 37 

Fortunately for the cause of liberty in America, 
James I died only a few months after he had an- 

f ailed without him ; but it must also be remembered that he had 
landed in irons and under a charge of inciting a mutiny on the 
way to America. When, however, the king 's secret orders were 
opened, it was found that James had made him a member of 
the Virginia Council. After two stormy years in Virginia, in 
which he unjustly called the ablest leaders among the settlers 
* ' tiffity-taff ety ' ' incompetents, he was sent back to England by 
Archer, Katcliffe, and Martin to "answere some misdemean- 
ors," among which was an alleged plotting with the savages 
to surprise and cut off his rival for the Presidency, Captain 
Francis West, and a party of colonists which West had led up 
the James river. 

Failing to secure further employment from the Patriot Party 
in control of the Virginia Company in London, this bold ex- 
plorer and excellent map-maker volunteered to lead the Pil- 
grim Fathers to their Promised Land. The Pilgrims, however, 
incontinently rejected the doughty Captain's offer, which seems 
to show clearly that this second group of would-be Americans 
would also, as far as possible, be unhampered by an agent of 
autocracy. Afterwards, Captain Smith asserted, with character- 
istic modesty, that the Pilgrims would have been ^'spared a 
wonderful deal of misery" if they had not held that "my 
books and maps were much better cheap than myself to teach 
them. ' ' 

Before landing, the Pilgrim Fathers signed an immortal in- 
strument for self-government; yet they, like the Virginians, 
^elt impelled, at first, to keep to some of the swaddling clothes 
thought proper for them by the king and such as Captain 
Smith. When, like the Virginians, after two years' trial, they 
flung these things off, they began to prosper greatly. The 
Pilgrims, indeed, attempted to carry out the same communistic 
scheme which had failed in the very beginnings of Jamestown. 
By this plan, all the settlers contributed to and drew from a 
common store or supply. The Plymouth settlers, like those at 
Jamestown, were forced to abandon this communistic pro- 
cedure, and Governor Bradford wrote that after he had, in 
1623, done away with the system of holding property in com- 
mon and had ** assigned to every family a parcel of land," a 
new spirit was shown by the settlers. They all became very 
industrious and ''more com was planted than otherwise would 
have been by any means the Governor or any other could use. ' ' 
He added that experience with the communal plan "tried sun- 



38 A HERITAGE OF FEEEDOM 

nulled the patent of the Virginia Company, under 
whose auspices and encouragement two self-governing 
colonies of Englishmen had been established in 
America; for the Plymouth settlement, which followed 
in 1620, provided an independent territorial exten- 
sion for the exercise of self-government in America. 
Moreover, this second colony profited by the example 
and, in a large measure, avoided the early mistakes 
of the first settlement. Both groups of settlers 
showed, from the beginning, their independence of 
spirit and the progressive character of their ideas. 
The Virginians, with financial endowment from the 
mother country, established a free school and a col- 
lege for the education of the natives shortly after the 
meeting of the first representative assembly in 1619 ; 
and Harvard, in New England, was established in 
1636, within a like period of time after the landing of 
the settlers there.* 



dry years, and that amongst godly and sober men, showed 
clearly the vanity of a system which was found to breed much 
confusion and discontent." 

* The educational plans of the Virginia colonists were in- 
definitely put off by the great Indian Massacre of 1622. The 
noble-hearted George Thorpe, in charge of the education of the 
natives, was warned of their proposed treachery, but he re- 
fused to believe it. Shortly after this massacre, some of the 
surviving Virginia colonists carried sorely-needed supplies of 
food to their compatriots at Plymouth. The Captain of their 
ship, John Huddleston, warned the Pilgrims of similar danger 
from the Indians, Captain Huddleston may have been ac- 
quainted with Shakespeare's dramas, and possibly with Shakes- 
peare himself, for he began his warning thus: ^'Friends, 
countrymen and neighbors . . . Bad news doth spread itself 
too far." Continuing, he added: . . . *'Yet I will so far in- 
form you that myself, with many good friends in the south 
colony of Virginia, have received such a blow, that 400 per- 



THE PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY 39 

The evidence of the co-operation of the settlers with 
the patriot group of founders in England is most 
interesting. When Sandys and his associates were 
struggling to preserve the Company in London, the 
Governor, Council, and Burgesses in Virginia testified 
to the beneficent results accruing to the Colony under 
popular management. When Sir John Harvey and 
the other members of the Royal Commission * of in- 
vestigation reached Virginia, they asked the Bur- 
gesses to subscribe to a statement expressing their 
consent to the establishment of royal control. The 
Assembly, however, returned the paper unsigned, 
accompanied by the statement: *'When our consent 
to the surrender of the Patents shall be required, will 
be the most propitious [time] to make reply; in the 
meantime, we conceive his Majesties intention of 
changing the government hath proceeded from much 
misinformation/' — ''misinformation'' which has long 
persisted, owing to King James 's diligent suppression 
of free speech and his autocratic control of all ^'pub- 
lic prints. ' ' The Assembly then addressed a letter to 
the King in which they prayed that their liberal in- 
stitutions might not be destroyed and the old Smith 
faction of the Company placed over them again, f 

sons will not make good our losses. Therefore, I do intreat you 
(although not knowing you) that the old rule which I learned 
when I went to school, may be sufficient. That is, 'Happy is 
he whom other men's harm doth make to beware.' " 

* See p. 30. 

f The royalist-inclined faction led^ by Sir Thomas Smith is 
here meant. The Assembly even refused to let the King's 
Commission see a copy of this letter and other similar docu- 
ments. When it was discovered that acting Secretary Edward 



40 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

When Charles I ascended the English throne as the 
second Stuart king imbued, like his predecessor, with 
the dogma of divine right, he owed some debts for cer- 
tain favours received from members of the patriot 
party in England; and, for a time, Sir Edwin 
Sandys had hopes of the development of a more lib- 
eral spirit in him than had been shown by his father. 
But selfish or designing counsellors were at court, 
and it is not improbable that Spanish spies again 
played their part in arousing royal jealousies of the 
proceedings of the patriot group. By 1625, popular 
discontent had greatly increased in Britain, and 
Charles I was obliged, in addition, to deal with two 
independently inclined colonies in North America, 
whereas James had had to deal with but one. The 
spirit of democracy had become triple-headed, and 
threefold as threatening to autocracy as before; for 
James I, in endeavouring to extricate himself from a 
double difficulty with the Virginia Company and a 
''seditious Parliament, ' ' had, partly through patriot 
design and partly by chance, created in the New Eng- 
land settlements a further source of trouble. This 
third source of controversy between the divine right 
of kings and the rights of the people was not suffi- 
ciently developed to merit the attention of James in 
the last years of his reign, but it was destined to add 
enormously to the difficulties of his successors. 

Sir Edwin Sandys may properly be regarded as also 

the author of this new menace to autocracy and as 

Sharpless had secretly given copies to a member of the Com- 
mission, he was punished by being * ' sent to the Pillorie, ' ' with 
the loss of ' ^ a part of one of his eares. ' ^ 



THE PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY 41 

the Founder of the Second and Separate Extension 
of Anglo-American Democracy in the New World. 
It had so happened that Sir Edwin, who was a cham- 
pion of religious toleration as well as of political free- 
dom, well knew the courage and character of John 
Robinson, the pastor of the Separatist Congregation 
exiled in the Netherlands. Robinson had been one 
of those English clergymen who had been driven from 
their original pastorates by James I. He had, how- 
ever, found a refuge in the house of Willian^ Brew- 
ster, then living on the estate of Sir Edwin Sandys' 
brother. "When the Pilgrims applied to the Virginia 
Company for a grant of land in the Virginia Colony, 
their proposition was cordially endorsed by the Patriot 
Party under the leadership of Sandys. Not only did 
these Separatists obtain their patent from the Com- 
pany, but Sandys, in disfavour with the king, per- 
suaded his friends to try to secure a promise from his 
majesty that the proposed settlement would not be 
molested. This James would not promise, but the 
English exiles in the Netherlands represented them- 
selves as being content with obtaining the patent only. 
They were persuaded, by the logic of many prece- 
dents, that '*a scale as hard as the house floor" would 
not hold an autocrat to any agreement he might be 
pleased to make.* 

* * * He [Chancellor von Bethmann-Holweg] said that the step 
taken by His Majesty's Government was terrible to a degree. 
. . . just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to 
make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than 
to be friends with her. . . . Herr von Jagow wished me to un- 
derstand that for strategical reasons it was a matter of life 
and death to Germany to advance through Belgium and violate 



42 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOxM 

If the original intentions of the Virginia Company 
and of the Pilgrims had been carried out, the latter 
would have added to the settlement and strength of 
democracy within the bounds of the Virginia Colony ; 
but, by an accident or incident of navigation, they 
landed on the wintry coast of New England, whence 
the commander of the vessel refused to take them to 
their promised destination. Therefore, the patent se- 
cured under the Virginia Company became invali- 
dated as being out of the jurisdiction of the parent 
corporation. Hence it was that the principles of self- 
government were separately extended to the new Col- 
ony through the famous * * Compact ' ' drawn up on the 
Mayflower. 

Sir Edwin Sandys, as the leading Founder of An- 
glo-American democracy, had, geographically at least, 
builded better than he knew. As the guiding spirit 
of the Virginia Company and as counsellor, friend, 
and patron of the Pilgrim emigrants, he led the way 
in securing a great territorial extension for the prac- 

the latter 's neutrality, so I would wish him to understand that 
it was, so to speak, a matter of ^ife and death' for the 
honour of Great Britain that she should keep her solemn en- 
gagement to do her utmost to defend Belgium's neutrality if 
attacked. That solemn compact simply had to be kept, or 
what confidence could any one have in engagements given by 
Great Britain in the future? The Chancellor said: 'But at 
what price will that compact have been kept? Has the British 
Government thought of that?' " 

— Eeport of Sir Edward Goshen, British 
Ambassador at Berlin, 1914. 
Cf., also, the maxim of Frederick the Great, greatest of the 
House of Hohenzollern : "Do not be ashamed of making in- 
terested alliances from which you yourself can derive the whole 
advantage. Do not make the foolish mistake of not breaking 
them when you believe your interests require it." 



THE PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY 43 

tice of self-government in America; and from this 
Massachusetts settlement were destined to spring the 
''first written constitution" of the Connecticut colony 
and the religious freedom of the Khode Island off- 
shoot. It may truthfully be said of Sandys that no 
man in history had greater vision and none began a 
labour fraught with more beneficent results for hu- 
man liberty. One hundred and fifty years before Jef- 
ferson pictured what free Anglo- America should be, 
Sandys worked for it; and three hundred years be- 
fore the present association of peoples in the British 
Commonwealth, Sir Edwin was doubtless discussing 
some of its basic principles with Bacon, Southampton, 
Shakespeare, and the Ferrars, within sight of the 
Royal Arch at Aldersgate, built and dedicated to an 
autocrat who insisted upon the divine right of kings. 
The Great Experiment more than proved its worth 
to liberty-loving Englishmen; so that, for the next 
century and a half, liberty-seeking settlers thronged 
the coast of the North American Continent. There 
followed, in rapid succession to the foundations at 
Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, the establishment of 
religious toleration by the Calverts in Marjdand, 
which barely anticipated that established by Roger 
AVilliams in Rhode Island. New York, at first under 
Dutch control, became the ** melting pot'* of many 
peoples. Pennsylvania set an example of fair dealings 
with the natives ; and Oglethorpe opened Georgia as a 
refuge for honest men oppressed by the harsh laws of 
that day and generation, which William Penn him- 
self, afterwards imprisoned for debt, would fain have 



44 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

enjoyed. Again, when the royal will attempted to 
put into effect a feudal system of *4ords, landgraves, 
and caciques," called by John Locke the "Grand 
Model," Carolinians, on the free soil of America, 
would have none of it. In 1642, Englishmen rose 
against the intolerable tyranny of Charles I and over- 
threw with him the dogma of divine right; but Eng- 
lishmen in the Virginia colony had, seven years be- 
fore, summarily deposed their royal governor in the 
person of Sir John Harvey. In the New England 
colonies, English settlers clung to their liberal char- 
ters and determined to maintain their rights "by 
peaceful means, if possible, but forcibly if they must. ' ' 
And three Stuart autocrats failed to bring these "ob- 
stinate people" into dutiful submission. Whether 
Englishmen went abroad or stayed at home, they kept 
up a never ceasing struggle for liberty, — for self- 
government and popular privileges in the Colonies, 
or for a more popular form of government at home. 

When Parliaments in England procrastinated over 
the king's demands and sought to obtain popular 
privileges in return for taxes, they did what the co- 
lonial assemblies in America at one time or another 
had done or were doing with their royal or their pro- 
prietary governors. In both countries, there were 
periods of apparent retrogression. When, however, 
there appeared the autocratic Governor Berkeley in 
Virginia, oppressive orders in Massachusetts, or a 
Governor Tryon in North Carolina, a Bacon arose in 
the first colony, an Otis in the second, and a band of 
"Regulators" in the third. Always the sum of the 



THE PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY 45 

forward movements exceeded those of the periods of 
retrogression. 

In Britain, the Great Rebellion of 1642 against 
royal rule was succeeded by the restoration of a 
Stuart King in 1660; but Charles II, whatever his 
blunders, was careful, at least, not to insist upon a 
divine right to govern. ' ' He who never said a foolish 
thing nor ever did a wise one ' ' was shrewd enough to 
know that this dogma had been discarded in England, 
at least, though the throne itself had been restored. 
The Restoration of 1660 was followed by the Revolu- 
tion of 1688. The latter did not do away with the 
king, but it substituted, in the place of an undesirable 
monarch, one more acceptable to Anglo-Celtic free- 
men.* 

* The union of the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon was fortunate 
for both races in that the best qualities of either were comple- 
mentary to the other. As a recognition of the contribution of 
the Celt to the union, the term Anglo-Celtic may well be used 
in place of the less accurate though more common hyphenate 
Anglo-Saxon. The rougher characteristics of the Teuton emi- 
grant on Britain's soil became softened by the more emotional 
and imaginative temperament of the Celt. English history 
seems to show that when these races have harmoniously mingled, 
government, literature, religion, and the whole social structure 
have been benefited thereby. Sir Edwin Sandys and William 
Shakespeare were Anglo-Celtic, and we cannot picture them as 
being so gifted without this union of the races in their blood. 
Their ideals were forced to find some way to burst the bonds 
of mediaeval custom; and to them America became the Land 
of Opportunity, or in their own words, a ''providence cast be- 
fore them.'' Thomas Jefferson, also of Anglo-Celtic an- 
cestry, was, in the New World, the political descendant of Sir 
Edwin Sandys, as well as the blood relative of liberal English- 
men who suffered death or imprisonment under the Stuart 
kings. 

Perhaps it is due to the influence of the Celt that the English- 
speaking peoples have ever referred to the land of their origin 



46 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

In America, *' every school boy knows" something, 
at least, of the later struggle for popular liberty in 
the thirteen English colonies under the several gov- 
ernors or other agents appointed by the British kings. 
He knows, also, that ultimately a British king went 
so far in his reactionary policies that the colonies de- 
clared their complete independence of the mother 
country. On the other hand, a volume has recently 
been written * to show how little the school boy learns 
of the dual nature of the struggle, of mutual misun- 
derstanding, and of the widespread sympathy in Brit- 
ain with American ideals, together with the suppressed 
popular opposition to the temporary ascendancy of 
autocratic methods in Great Britain. True, a wise 
provision of an unofficial board of national examiners 
causes the prospective college student to prepare a 
digest of the speech by Edmund Burke on Concilia- 
tion ; but the student learns to think of this speech, in 
most cases, as the opinion of a single liberal-minded 
member of the British Parliament and not as an ex- 
pression of the popular opposition to the course of 
the ''personally controlled" government of George 
III and a Parliament which was then elected by the 
merest fraction of the population. 

as the Mother Country, whereas the Teutonic peoples have re- 
ferred to theirs as the Fatherland. 

*Altsehul: The American Bevolution in our School Text- 
BooTcs. 



Autocracy Severs the Bonds of Political Union 

The struggle of the English people for popular 
rights against autocratic rule was carried on in Amer- 
ica as in England. In the colonies, however, the peo- 
ple, by virtue of the precedent secured by their Great 
Charter of 1609, and because, also, of their very dis- 
tance from the seat of royal authority, developed and 
practised a greater measure of self-government than 
was then possible in Britain. Eestrictive trade laws 
were laid upon them, both by the Parliament under 
the Commonwealth and by later Parliaments under 
royal authority, but these laws were, in the main, un- 
enforced. As a sidelight of history it is worth noting 
that nearly all the Revolutionary leaders of the first 
or Virginia colony, for example, were either descend- 
ants of members of the Patriot Party in England or 
of those who took an active part in the institution of 
free government in America. In Great Britain, on 
the other hand, it is an interesting fact that three 
members of the minority of the House of Lords who 
supported the patriot party in America in 1775 were 
the Dukes of Devonshire, Portland, and Northumber- 
land. These peers were descendants of the Earl of 
Southampton, who, as the trusted friend of Sandys 
and the other patriot founders of America, succeeded 
Sandys after the mandate of the king to the Com- 
pany : ^'Choose the Devil if you will, hut not Sir Ed- 

47 



48 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

win Sa{ndys/' The saying that a man's education he- 
gins a hundred years or more hefore he is born has 
never been more aptly illustrated than in the case of 
these American patriot descendants of liberal English 
ancestors. The political forms of English and of 
American representative democracy are likewise de- 
scended from the same stock; and, in their separate 
developments, they have maintained their relationship 
and points of resemblance, although, in 1776, the fam- 
ily ties were broken.* 

The Dukes of Devonshire, Portland, and Northum- 
berland, true to their inheritance from the patriot 
Earl of Southampton and, consequently, to their po- 
litical sympathies with Thomas Jefferson, John Ad- 
ams, and the American patriot party, voted with the 
opposition to the autocratic George III. The open 
opposition of these men and that of Burke, Barre, Pitt, 
and Fox voiced the otherwise inarticulate popular op- 
position of a large body of Englishmen who, at that 
time, had no part in the government and whose peti- 
tions to Parliament on behalf of Anglo-American lib- 

* " In spite of the controversies which have at times raged 
between the two peoples, we speak the same language as the 
English; our customs have been fashioned after theirs; our 
legal procedure has been founded upon theirs; their ideas of 
government and their conception of liberty are ours as well. 
In spite of the wars we have fought against them, we have 
never thought of turning to any other nation as a model for 
what is most essential in our public and private life. Many 
nationalities have been brought together in this melting pot; 
but the influence of all other nations remains negligible com- 
pared to that of England. She is, after all, the Mother Coun- 
try, from whom we have acquired what really counts in the 
long run : language, customs, political liberty, tradition 1 ' ' 
— Altschul: The American devolution in our School Text-Bool:s, 



AUTOCRACY SEVERS THE BONDS OF UNION 49 

erties went unheeded. The expressions of the leaders 
of the English patriot party in the Parliaments of 
George III were much louder than the '*soft mutter- 
ings" heard on behalf of the American settlers in the 
Parliaments of James I, but they were not strong 
enough to restrain the course of the last king of Brit- 
ain who dared assert a personal rule, even though he 
did not claim for that rule a divine origin as in the 
case of his Stuart predecessors.* 

On going back over the Revolutionary struggle in 

* It is one of the hopeful signs of the times that the business 
men of America are beginning to take an active interest in 
the investigations of history. Not only will the subject of 
history be benefited by an ^'interchange of theory and prac- 
tice ' ' ; but the future policies of the Nation may be shaped to 
greater advantage if based upon a more general and better 
understanding of the past. Much of the earlier American his- 
tory from which we have drawn our impressions of the Revolu- 
tionary conflict and of events of international import since 
that period has not been consciously partisan, but it has been 
based on evidence, in a double sense, partial. The result has 
given the American people a somewhat provincial viewpoint, 
which easily becomes, under the expanding influence of a cer- 
tain kind of patriotic teaching or of ' ' Fourth of July oratory, ^ ' 
very largely chauvinistic, or, in more popular phraseology, good 
American "buncombe." The comparatively recent researches 
of original investigators of the type of Sydney George Fisher 
and others must very materially modify the interpretation of 
Colonial history and the Revolutionary period. As in the case 
'of all reformers, Mr. Fisher has been attacked as having gone 
too far; but, whether he went too far or not, his work has 
already had a very profound influence upon historical perspec- 
tive and proportion. In like manner, the brief monographs of 
Charles Francis Adams have helped in the overthrow of error. 
These writers are especially mentioned because it may be said 
of them that neither had followed the study of history as a 
vocation. In yet another instance, an intensive experience in 
the broadening sphere of international trade may have inspired 
the recent investigations of George Louis Beer, through whose 
findings a flood of new light has been shed upon intercolonial 
relations and British colonial policies. 



50 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

the light of this evidence, it would seem that even the 
autocratic government of George III had grievances, 
and some degree of right on its side. If George III 
was stupid, he and his ministers were probably sincere 
in their efforts to govern wisely, according to their 
interpretation. They were ignorant of actual condi- 
tions. They did not, and possibly could not, under- 
stand how far representative democracy in America 
had gone in the matter of self-government. There 
was nothing like it in Europe, so that they had near 
them no standard of measurement for the practical 
developments that followed the evolution of local 
management of colonial affairs. Not without justice, 
the British ministry had much in mind the defence 
of her colonies against the otherwise overwhelming 
hostility of Spain and the successive efforts for world 
dominion by an autocratic France. The British Gov- 
ernment had held and was holding the Colonies united 
through the common bond of race and origin. Be- 
cause of this aid towards union and therefore greater 
strength, the British government felt that a very defi- 
nite service had been rendered, for it was known that 
the colonists entertained very strong jealousies among 
themselves. On some occasions, only the tact and 
earnest efforts of British officials restrained the Col- 
onies from engaging in disastrous and possibly fatal 
disputes with each other. Furthermore, the patience 
of the British ministry was tried to the utmost by 
reason of the fact that, in time of war, many Ameri- 
can merchants, ship-owners, and seamen profited 
greatly by furnishing the common enemy with food 



AUTOCRACY SEVERS THE BONDS OF UNION 51 

and supplies; and that, when apprehended, it was 
almost impossible to convict the offenders before any 
judge or jury that sat in America. 

On the other hand, if the thirteen Colonies had been 
united and efficient in defending themselves, and if 
they had offered to provide a minimum payment of 
their share of the expense incurred by the mother 
country in protecting them against the French and 
Indians, there might have been no open breach. The 
British ministry was doubtless aware, also, that two- 
thirds of the American people were indifferent or 
actually opposed to the attitude and acts of what was 
regarded as the radical element in America. A large 
proportion of the Americans believed with Fairfax, 
the friend and patron of George Washington, that 
matters of difference between the colonies and the 
mother country could and would be adjusted in due 
time ; that it was a mistake or even a wrong, to destroy 
or confiscate private property, as in the matter of the 
tea ; and that it was a serious error to extol as martyrs 
men who, in the so-called *' Boston Massacre," had 
fallen in making a mob attack upon the soldiers of 
the Government. 

Nevertheless, the protests of the patriot minority in 
America must have seemed reasonable, or there would 
not have been such a large proportion of the Britisk 
people who were not in harmony with the policies of 
the Government. Later, when war began, this oppo- 
sition extended to the British Army and Navy. Many 
officers resigned their commissions rather than fight 
against their countrymen in America, and others 



52 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

prosecuted the war in such a half-hearted manner that 
at times they helped rather than harassed the patriot 
party. They hoped that time and circumstances 
would bring about a compromise or some adjustment 
of Anglo-American differences. Such a compromise 
was finally offered by the British Government, but it 
was refused by the Americans, who had then declared 
for independence. 

After the American Revolution had run its course 
and had brought about a result much more radical 
than the British Revolution of the preceding century, 
peace came through the recognition by the British 
Government of the independence of thirteen "Sov- 
ereign States ' ' ; but, for many years, there were Brit- 
ish statesmen and not a few Americans who believed 
that the loosely knit Confederation of States could not 
stand alone and that the two English-speaking peoples 
would reunite under a single flag. Furthermore, the 
people of both countries felt certain immediate disad- 
vantages in separation. For example, the former col- 
onists felt that it was a great grievance that they were 
no longer the beneficiaries of special trade relations 
with the West Indies, while British merchants experi- 
enced losses in trade with America. 



Origin' of Political Misunderstanding in Historical 
Misconceptions 

It was perhaps natural that the American people 
should soon cease to distinguish between the autocratic 
government of George III, which prosecuted the war, 
and the British people, who very generally opposed 
it.* In Great Britain, it was more or less to be ex- 
pected that an aristocratic or Tory element should 
despise the upstart Republic with its ** dangerously 
radical'' ideas about equality and fraternity — ideas 
that led first to republican excesses in France, fol- 
lowed by a military autocracy under Napoleon. It 
was natural, also, for Americans, in terms quite out of 
proportion to the whole truth, to contrast in the press, 
the school, the text-book, and the pulpit the sufferings 
and lofty idealism of the Revolutionary patriots with 
the arrogance of the British Government and the mis- 
deeds of British soldiers and the mercenary troops 
supplied by a number of the petty autocrats of Cen- 
tral Europe, t 

* The Declaration of Independence, as drawn up by Jef- 
ferson, is not an arraignment of the British people, but of their 
Government as then constituted. Cf. Jefferson's attitude to- 
ward the British Government when that Government suggested 
an alliance with the United States for the protection of Ameri- 
can democracy. See p. 67. 

t It is sometimes forgotten that * ' Hessian ' ' has become, in 
American history, a conveniently comprehensive term for all 
the mercenary troops whose services were sold to the British 
Government by their respective rulers. 

53 



54 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

A small volume has lately been written on 
' * Breaches of Anglo-American Treaties. ' ^ The book is 
based on fact ; and, if it were the whole truth, it would 
indicate that there has been little good faith and much 
sharp dealing between the English-speaking democ- 
racies as representatives of the most highly developed 
and powerful types of governments of the people, by 
the people, and for the people. On the other hand, 
there are great volumes of records and an immensity 
of evidence to show that, of all governments, the Brit- 
ish and the American constitute those that have been 
most in direct contact and yet have most successfully 
lived together, if not always in perfect amity, at least 
in a beneficent state of international peace. 

It is true that certain parts of the very first treaty 
between Great Britain and the United States were 
promptly broken by the former ; but it is equally true 
that some of the provisions of the same treaty were, 
from the start, disregarded by the United States, not 
because of bad faith, but because of inability on the 
part of the first Federal Government to compel the 
individual States to fulfil the terms of an interna- 
tional agreement. 

Notwithstanding this double breach of the treaty of 
1783, Anglo-American peace prevailed until some time 
after Great Britain became involved in a war against 
the world-dominion plans of Napoleon Bonaparte. It 
was a remarkable chain of circumstances which led, 
in 1812, the newly-established American Eepublic to 
fight, not in actual alliance, but at least by the side of 
the most dangerous military power of the day against 



ORIGIN OF POLITICAL MISUNDERSTANDING 55 

a nation fighting in defence of the principles of po- 
litical freedom. In America, historical prejudices 
and misconceptions, aggravated by ultra-patriotic 
teachings, had already played their part in obscuring 
the greater issues; but tactless obstinacy on the part 
of the British ministry and arrogant aggression on the 
part of British naval officers contributed in forcing 
the peacefully-inclined American government into an 
unnatural and unnecessary war which, had the Ameri- 
can Republic been stronger, might have enabled the 
autocratic Napoleon to carry out his designs against 
the freedom of nations.* 

* In spite of the accustomed outcry against Great Britain, 
there were Americans who saw in the military aggression of a 
misguided France under Bonaparte a more far-reaching men- 
ace, in principle, at least, than the arrogant disregard of Great 
Britain towards the righfs claimed by the United States for 
American seamen. Thomas Jefferson has been accused of 
cowardice in advocating the Non-Importation Acts rather than 
a declaration of war against Great Britain. In this matter, 
Jefferson has been misunderstood. He had dared to declare 
war against the '^Barbary Powers" of North Africa when the 
most powerful European nations were paying yearly tribute to 
these Mohammedan governments. Presidents Washington and 
Adams also had thought it best to purchase immunity for 
American commerce. Washington had written in old-style dip- 
lomatic terms to the young Emperor of Morocco on his ac- 
cession: "Beceive, great and good friend, my sincere sympathy 
with you in that loss"; i.e., the loss of "the late Emperor, 
your father, and our friend of glorious memory." The pro- 
nouncedly original Jefferson wanted then to do away with 
this ''fine language" and talk to the Barbary rulers in the 
terms of big guns. Jefferson was not afraid of war with 
Great Britain, but he was unwilling to fight on the side of an 
autocratic France when he thought he could gain his ends with 
the British Government by peaceful means. Evidence has now 
come to light in the London archives to show that the com- 
mercial pressure exerted by Jefferson was having its effect and 
must have obtained results in the reform of British foreign 



56 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

In the struggle with Napoleon, the political exist- 
ence of Great Britain depended upon her continued 
control of the sea. She had need of all her man- 
power; but, in American ports, she lost crew after 
crew by desertion. American wages were higher, and 
there were Americans at every wharf raady with in- 
ducements to British sailors to desert battleship, mer- 
chant-ship, and country. In this matter, Americans 
felt that they were doing a good service in smiting 
their traditional foe by crippling her trade and war- 
strength. Napoleon Bonaparte, with an autocrat's 
characteristic contempt for scraps of paper, had 
treacherously seized American ships in European 
ports; yet this was forgotten or ignored when Great 
Britain began to insist on the alleged right of search 
and impressment, in her efforts to regain her sailors. 
British bungling and high-handed seizures of Ameri- 
can seamen followed, together with the famous Orders 
in Council, which led to the American declaration of 
war. Even then, Anglo-American peace might have 
remained unbroken, if, by an Atlantic cable, a later 
combination of American genius and enterprise and 
British capital, the news of Great Britain's with- 
drawal of her Orders in Council could have reached 
America beforle the first blows were struck. Na- 
poleon's orders of like character were not withdrawn, 

policy but for the opposition to the Non-Intercourse Acts in 
America itself. This American opposition and the frequent 
evasion of the Acts caused these measures to be withdrawn just 
as the British importers and manufacturers were, apparently, 
at least, about to force their Government to yield the point at 
issue. 



ORIGIN OF POLITICAL MISUNDERSTANDING 57 

and war might ultimately have been declared against 
the French Empire instead, with Great Britain as an 
ally in a world-wide struggle for freedom from the 
domination of a military power. 



The Dawn of Anglo-American Peace 

The treaty of Ghent in 1814 followed a war, which, 
from the American standpoint, resulted in unexpected 
naval successes; in both disasters and victories on 
land; and in the revelation of considerable disunion 
sentiment in some of the States, from which the Brit- 
ish received secret aid and to which they looked for 
actual co-operation if the war continued. This second 
treaty between America and Great Britain was inde- 
cisive in its terms and, in the main, unsatisfactory to 
both countries. Had it been made between less popu- 
lar governments, both sides would have begun at once 
exhaustive and exhausting preparations for another 
struggle. In America the exact opposite happened. 
Two democracies, broadly termed Canada, on the one 
side, and the United States, on the other, found them- 
selves, in irritated mood, facing each other on a bound- 
ary line, the extent of which would stagger even the 
governments of Europe to find means to fortify. As 
the war went on, and after it was finished, both sides 
were frantically engaged in building battleships to 
secure supremacy on the Great Lakes; and America 
was dangerously near emulating for all time the mili- 
tarism of Europe. 

But some one stopped to consider. Perhaps there 
were many who simultaneously stopped to consider 
what all this military preparation would mean to the 

58 



THE DAWN OF ANGLO- AMEMCAlSr PEACE 59 

future of the two peoples. As the immediate result of 
this forethought and liberal statesmanship, the dual 
preparation for naval supremacy on the Great Lakes 
was suspended, and an agreement was reached which 
provided that both nations should dismantle what war 
vessels they had already built, and that henceforth 
no armed vessels should be maintained on the Lakes 
above a certain specific armament necessary for police 
purposes. It was also agreed that there should be no 
fortifications constructed on the three thousand miles 
of border line. 

The men who conceived and executed this historic 
agreement that removed, apparently forever, a mili- 
tary menace and burden from two peoples, but lately 
at war with each other, should be honoured with a 
monument built upon the international boundary line. 
Moreover, it should be remembered that this agree- 
ment was drawn up and carried out in good faith, 
despite the remains of some particular prejudices 
among the Canadian people against the United States, 
due largely to the immigration to that country of 
large numbers of British Loyalists who were driven 
out of the United States during, and subsequent to, 
the Revolutionary War. 

Near the close of the War of 1812, the United States 
had won successes on land at Baltimore and Platts- 
burg in September, 1814; but Jackson's amazing vic- 
tory over Wellington's veterans in the battle of New 
Orleans caused the British * ' Tory ' ' element to have an 
increased respect for ''radical" American democracy. 
At the same time, that victory gave a somewhat un- 



60 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

fortunate boost to American * ^ bumptiousness " and 
feeling of self-sufficiency, from which the nation is 
now beginning to recover as it becomes an active par- 
ticipant in the arena of world politics and policies. 
This ''bumptiousness" — its persistency, and its per- 
meation from the popular imagination upwards into 
official life, has shown interesting outcroppings on 
several occasions during the century of Anglo-Ameri- 
can peace. 

If Great Britain, even one hundred years ago, had 
been an aggressive military power, or if she had been 
autocratically quick to take offence, she had ample 
excuse for such a course in 1818, at a time when she 
was not, as in 1812-1815, engaged in battle in Europe. 
It is highly probable, indeed, that she would not have 
permitted the incident that then took place to be 
closed with any power but the United States without 
recourse to arms to secure reparation for the execu- 
tion of British subjects in neutral territory in time of 
peace. On the part of America, it was not only 
* * shirt-sleeve diplomacy, ' ' but drum-head disregard of 
international law as well. In brief, the ' ' hero of New 
Orleans" had at that time invaded Spanish territory 
in Florida to avenge Indian invasions from that quar- 
ter. Finding that Alexander Arbuthnot, a Scotch- 
man of education and ability, and his British employe, 
Robert Ambrister, had aided the Indians, Jackson 
very promptly hanged the employer, and later or- 
dered the employe shot — a difference in the form of 
their execution appreciated by military men, while 
the latter 's more honourable fate must have especially 



THE DAWN OF ANGLO-AMERICAN PEACE 61 

aroused his sense of gratitude to the American com- 
mander ! When the news of this American aggression 
reached Britain, press and people demanded an im- 
mediate vindication of the nation ^s outraged honour. 
The British Government was almost swept off its feet 
into action before full official information had ar- 
rived. It was then learned on what grounds Jackson 
had acted, and although Great Britain regarded Jack- 
son 's act as unusual and high-handed, it could not ap- 
prove of Arbuthnot's course, and the incident caused 
no clash between the two governments. 



Anglo-American Democracy Confronts the Forces 
OF Pan-European Autocracy 

During the sixteenth century, it had been the ardent 
hope of Philip II of Spain to force all the people of 
the world under the control of a group of autocrats 
who should rule by "divine right." In 1815, this 
dream seemed about to be realised. The Republic of 
Prance had, in twenty-five years, fallen under the 
spell of Napoleon and then, through external pressure, 
the nation had been "restored" to a member of the 
Bourbon family, the former despoilers of both land 
and people. At this time, the Russian Czar, the Prus- 
sian King, the Austrian Emperor, and eventually the 
French King, entered into an agreement called by 
them the "Holy Alliance." This "Holy Alliance" 
was, by the combined strength of its enslaved peo- 
ples, to stamp out popular liberty everywhere. The 
people of Russia were called upon to suppress the 
liberty of the people of Poland ; the people of Austria 
were commanded to beat back a rising tide of democ- 
racy in Italy; and the people of once-republican 
France were engaged in crushing the spirit of revolt 
against "divine rule" in Spain. In Europe, autoc 
racy was overwhelmingly triumphant. Even republi- 
can Switzerland had, for a time, succumbed to the 
apparently irresistible forces of reaction. There were, 

62 



DEMOCRACY VERSUS AUTOCRACY 63 



nevertheless, in the minds of the members of the 
' ' Holy Alliance, ' ' three sources of disquietude. 

During the European upheaval which had resulted 
in the downfall of Napoleon, the colonies of Spain in 
South America had broken from the control of the 
mother country, and had established their own forms 
of government. It was, therefore, proposed by Czar 
Alexander of Russia, King Frederick William of 
Prussia, and Emperor Francis of Austria that by 
divine right and ''in accordance with the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ, ' ' they should unite in helping Ferdinand 
VII to recover his lost possessions. With democracy 
ruthlessly crushed in continental Europe by 1823, it 
seemed a comparatively easy matter to send an ir- 
resistible force across the seas and restore ''divine 
rulership" over the weak and ill-prepared republics 
of South America. 

But the second, and by far the greatest, cause for 
apprehension lay at their own doors. Alexander, 
Frederick William, and Francis had not conferred 
with the King of England for the awkward reason 
that the British ruler had, like his predecessors for 
nearly two hundred years, abandoned "divine right" 
theories, together with many of his royal preroga- 
tives. It had become necessary for King George IV 
to consult the free representatives of at least some 
proportion of his people before war was declared for 
any purpose against any other people; and, even if 
George IV had been willing, any frank public discus- 
sion of the more personal ideas of the "Holy Alli- 
ance" would prove distinctly embarrassing, if not 



64 A HERITAGE OF EHEEDOM 

fatal, to the success of its plans.* Great Britain had 
previously joined forces with the continental rulers 
to preserve herself and to ovt^rthrow the all-threaten- 
ing autocracy of Napoleon ; but the ' ' Holy Alliance ' ' 
could not expect her free people to help overthrow the 
freedom of others. Indeed, Alexander, Frederick 
William, Francis, Louis, and Ferdinand held that 
Great Britain was very little better than a much-de- 
tested republic. These rulers felt that it was most 
unfortunate to have so many of the principles of 
democracy established so near at hand ; but the Brit- 
ish were considered ' ' slow and stupid ' ' so that if 
their government did not actively interfere, the South 
American plans of the ' ' Holy Alliance ' ^ could be car- 
ried out. 

A third source of misgiving lay in the apparently 
successful establishment of democracy in the United 
States. That, however, was a very distant annoyance 
which could be attended to in due time. Except for 
the disturbing example the North American Eepublic 
had set to the plain people of their own countries, 
the influence and ''undisciplined'* power of the 

*^'I think the sentence in American history that I myself 
am proudest of is that in the introductory sentences of the 
Declaration of Independence, where the writers say that a due 
respect for the opinion of mankind demands that they state 
their reasons for what they are about to do. I venture to say 
that decent respect for the opinion of mankind demanded that 
those who started the present European War should have stated 
their reasons, but they did not pay any heed to the opinion if 
mankind, and the reckoning will come when the settlement 
comes. ' ' 

— Woodrow Wilson, June, 30, 1916. 

Cf. Statement of William II at Koenigsberg, Aug. 25, 1910, 
p. 18, footnote. 



DEMOCHACY VERSUS AUTOCRACY 65 

United States was negligible. Besides, argued these 
autocrats of the ' ' Holy Alliance, ' ' America and Brit- 
ain had just emerged from the second armed conflict 
of the past half century. They further observed, with 
especial satisfaction, that the American people, who 
held the power and who swayed their government, ap- 
peared to dislike the British people and government 
above any other people and government on earth. 
Therefore, the autocrats of the "Holy Alliance" and 
their advisers did not even consider the possibility of 
these two apparently hostile peoples making common 
cause against their private designs. 

There stood out, however, in irreconcilable opposi- 
tion, against Philip II 's dream of world autocracy an 
obstacle which may be personified as Thomas Jeffer- 
son's dream of the world-progress of popular govern- 
ment. Translated into action by the forces of autoc- 
racy on the one side and the steadily expanding prin- 
ciples and ideals of democracy on the other, the whole 
world was to be shaken in irrepressible conflict. Jef- 
ferson's ''world-dream" of human liberty and 
America's actual achievement had been derived di- 
rectly from the political heritage given to America 
by Sir Edwin Sandys and the English Founders of 
Anglo-American liberty. From the time he fell heir 
to that endowment, the success of the Anglo-American 
in developing the principles of representative self- 
government had been watched with increasing in- 
terest, so that his example inspired Englishmen in the 
mother country, and became, also, the hope of the 
liberals of other lands. 



6Q A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

On the other hand, in 1823, with European autoc- 
racy united, powerful, and aggressive, Pan-American 
democracy was seriously threatened. But the unex- 
pected happened. The plans of the partners in the 
"Holy Alliance'' were openly denounced by the free 
representatives of the British people ; and Great Brit- 
ain proposed to President Monroe, through George 
Canning, Secretary for Foreign Affairs, an alliance 
with the United States in order to preserve the inde- 
pendence of the menaced republics of the New World. 
To those on the European side of the Atlantic, there 
then appeared what must have seemed to minds run- 
ning in old or reactionary channels, the astounding 
spectacle of the ' ' rebel ' ' founders of the new republic, 
and presumably, therefore, the bitterest enemies of 
the British Government, rejoice in the prospect of 
such an alliance. Thomas Jefferson and James Madi- 
son, without reserve or qiialification, united in endors- 
ing this British suggestion. The latter promptly wrote 
to President Monroe that such co-operation with 
Great Britain ''must ensure success in the event of 
an appeal to force" on the part of the "Holy Al- 
liance," and that "it doubles the chance of success 
without that appeal." With a vision looking far be- 
yond historical disagreements or provincial preju- 
dices, the author of the Declaration of Independence 
forwarded to Monroe an opinion in which his insight 
into conditions now reads like a prophecy. The na- 
ture of this reply is becoming better known through 
recent publications, yet it bears repetition here, in 
part, at least : 



DEMOCRACY VERSUS AUTOCRACY 67 

"The question presented by the letters you have 
sent me," wrote Jefferson, ''is the most momentous 
which has ever been offered to my contemplation since 
that of independence that made us a nation. This 
sets our compass, and points the course which we are 
to steer thro' the ocean of time opening on our view, 
and never could we embark on it under circumstances 
more auspicious. Our first and fundamental maxim 
should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils 
of Europe; our second, never to suffer Europe to in- 
termeddle in trans- Atlantic affairs. America, North 
and South, has a set of interests distinct from those 
of Europe, and peculiarly her own. She should, 
therefore, have a system of her own, separate and 
apart from that of Europe. While the last is labour- 
ing to become the domicile of despotism, our en- 
deavour should surely be to make our hemisphere that 
of freedom. One nation, most of all, could disturb 
us in this pursuit. She now offers to lead, aid, and 
accompany us in it. By acceding to her proposition, 
we detach her from the band of despots, bring her 
mighty weight into the scale of free government and 
emancipate at one stroke a whole continent, which 
might otherwise linger long in doubt and difficulty. 
Great Britain is the nation which can do us the most 
harm of any one, or all on earth ; and with her on our 
side we need not fear the whole world. AVith her, 
then, we should the most sedulously nourish a cordial 
friendship ; and nothing would tend more to knit our 
affections than to be fighting once more side by side 
in the same cause. Not that I would purchase evea 



68 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

her amity at the price of taking part in her wars; 
but the war in which the present proposition might 
engage us, should that be its consequences, is not her 
war, but ours. Its object is to introduce and to estab- 
lish the American system of ousting from our land all 
foreign nations, of never permitting the powers of 
Europe to intermeddle with the affairs of our na- 
tions. It is to maintain our own principle, not to 
depart from it, and if, to facilitate this, we can effect 
a division in the body of the European powers, and 
draw over to our side its most powerful member, 
surely we should do it. But I am clearly of Mr. Can- 
ning's opinion, that it will prevent war, instead of 
provoking it. With Great Britain withdrawn from 
their side and shifted into that of our two continents, 
all Europe combined would not dare to risk war. 
Nor is the occasion to be slighted, which this proposi- 
tion offers, of declaring our protest against the atro- 
cious violations of the rights of nations by the inter- 
ference of any one in the internal affairs of another, 
so flagitiously begun by Bonaparte and now continued 
by the equally lawless Alliance, calling itself Holy. ' ' 

In spite, however, of the endorsement of Jefferson 
and Madison, the proposed alliance was not eft'ected. 
The designs of Alexander, Frederick William, Fran- 
cis, and Ferdinand were instead dashed to pieces by 
the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine with the 
official approval and support of Great Britain, which 
support alone gave the American Doctrine weight 
with the autocratic courts of Europe. In the mean- 
time, Louis of France had been dissuaded by Great 



DEMOCRACY VERSUS AUTOCRACY 69 

Britain from taking an active part in the proposed 
Latin- American scheme of the other sovereigns. How- 
ever much the European autocrats might at that 
time have scorned the power of the United States, 
they dared not attempt an invasion of distant America 
against the wishes of the mighty *^ mistress of the 
seas." Therefore, although the suggested Anglo- 
American plan of alliance, designed to protect the 
Latin-American republics, and to assure a greater 
measure of safety to the free governments of the 
United States and Great Britain, became known as an 
American policy, it owed its origin and its earliest 
authority to the spirit of Anglo-Celtic liberty in the 
people and government of Great Britain. 



A Century of Anglo-American Disagreements 
Settled by Discussion and Arbitration 

In the years that followed, as reactionary British 
ministers returned at times to power, and as Ameri- 
can assertiveness, oratory, and provincial history 
drove the people of the two nations apart in sympathy, 
there were periods of serious misunderstanding and 
mutual jealousies. At one time, indeed, in certain 
operations in Central America, Great Britain herself, 
with a government then influenced by powerful busi- 
ness interests, seemed to threaten the integrity of the 
American Doctrine which she had, indirectly, at least 
called into being. Again, representatives of a British 
ministry showed themselves actively interested in 
keeping the infant Republic of Texas from a proposed 
union with the United States. In the latter case, 
however. Great Britain could claim with justice that 
there seemed to be more politicians in the United 
States opposed to this union than there were in Great 
Britain. If Britain had developed misgivings about 
too great an American expansion in the New World, 
the northeastern States feared, in even greater meas- 
ure, that their political prestige and commercial in- 
terests would suffer by the addition of such vast new 
territories in the southwest.* 



* In 1844, the legislature of Massachusetts resolved that 
*Hhe project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested at the 

70 



ANGLO-AMEUICAN AGREEMENTS 71 



American aggressiveness in Anglo- American rela- 
tions was evident in connection with the Caroline in- 
cident, in which case popular and local antipathies 
were displayed against British authority in Canada; 
and in the Maine and Oregon boundary line disputes, 
in the discussion of which there were not only popu- 
lar, but political demonstrations against Great 

Britain. 

The Caroline incident owes its terminology to the 
fact that a vessel of that name was equipped on the 
American side of the Niagara River to act in co-opera- 
tion with insurrectionists in Canada. The insurrec- 
tionists, aided by Americans, had seized an island and 
were using this as a base of supplies for raids against 
the British-Canadian Government. The Caroline was 
finally seized and destroyed by a Canadian force at 
an American dock. This was as irregular a proceed- 
ing as the initial offence; but, under the circum- 
stances, it was, like Andrew Jackson's treatment of 
Arbuthnot and Ambrister, excused on the basis of 
retaliation for a previous injury. The incident is un- 
important; but the fact that, as in the Jackson-Ar- 
buthnot episode, the two governments settled their 
grievances without recourse to arms adds its testi- 
mony to the admirable side of Anglo-American rela- 
tions and to the essential similarity of their political 

threslioM, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of 
the Unioi." And again: ''That, under no circumstances what- 
ever, can the people of Massachusetts regard the proposition 
to admit Texas into the Union in any other light than as dan- 
gerous to its continuance in peace, in prosperity, and m the 
enjoyment of those blessings which it is the object of a free 
government to seeure." 



72 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

ideals in the maintenance of international peace and 
amity. 

Autocratic governments have furnished few exam- 
ples of open discussion. Their diplomacy is secret; 
and with them language becomes a camouflage to dis- 
guise their thoughts and policies. To these forms of 
diplomacy the governments of the United States and 
Great Britain have, in their relations with each other, 
furnished a marked contrast. For over a century, 
issues or differences arising between the two countries 
have been discussed openly. In some cases, indeed, 
the exchange of opinion between high officials has been 
so brusque as to stir up dangerous outbursts of popu- 
lar antagonism. In spite of such outbursts, however, 
the discussion continued and the difficulties were fin- 
ally adjusted. The two governments, in definite con- 
trast to those controlled by autocrats, have, at times, 
proved to be a check on popular belligerency. This 
is amply illustrated by several events prior to the 
American War of Secession. 

The boundary line between Maine and Canada 
(New Brunswick) had been but vaguely defined in the 
Anglo-American treaty of 1783. In 1814, the treaty 
of Ghent awarded to Great Britain a strip of land 
claimed by Maine and by Massachusetts as the 
** Mother State. '* "When the matter came up for set- 
tlement under President Jackson, it was referred by 
the Federal Government to the King of the Nether- 
lands as arbitrator. This international referee decided 
in favour of the claims of Great Britain. Thereupon, 
the Legislatures of Maine and Massachusetts declared 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 73 

that, as far as those States were concerned, if the 
agreement were ratified by the United States Senate, 
it would be regarded by them as ''null and void/' * 
Fortunately, however, the President and the 
United States were not forced to a decision against 
Massachusetts and Maine, on the one hand, or Great 
Britain, on the other, by reason of the unusual course 
of the British Government, which, in this instance 
also, showed the most evident sincerity in its effort 
to remain on friendly terms with America. Accord- 
ingly, Great Britain sent to the United States, as 
special envoy, Lord Ashburton, who had opposed, in 
1808, the British Orders in Council, the issuing of 
which led to the war in 1812. The dispute was finally 
settled in 1842 by the Webster- Ashburton treaty, in 



* A remarkable situation had thus arisen, both in a national 
sense and in an international one. It is not known whether 
President Jackson held, in matters concerning nullification, that 
' ' circumstances alter cases, ' ' but at least he must have felt that 
there was some weight in the saying. In the case of nullification 
and threatened secession in South Carolina, where he had acted 
with prompt decision, Jackson was swayed by personal emotions 
as well as by general motives of policy; and it may have been 
truly said of him that **He loved the Union and hated Cal- 
houn, ' ' so that he took steps to credit the former and discredit 
the latter. Again, in the case of Georgia versus the Federal 
Government and the dispossessed Cherokees, he had no griev- 
ance against Georgia, but a decided antipathy to the Indians. 
Consequently, he allowed Georgia to defy the United States 
Supreme Court without rebuke and with apparent personal 
satisfaction. In the matter of the Maine boundary dispute, the 
victor at New Orleans was swayed by no particular love for 
New England, the home of John Adams and the source of much 
bitter opposition to the War of 1812. On the other hand, he had 
not forgotten the sabre-cut given him as a boy, in South Caro- 
lina, by the British invader of Eevolutionary days. 



74 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

the conduct of which Webster showed great shrewd- 
ness in overcoming the opposition of the determined 
Governor of Maine, while Lord Ashburton displayed 
so conciliatory a spirit that he was afterwards roundly 
denounced in Canada for yielding too much to the 
claims of the United States.* 

Scarcely had the Maine boundary been settled, 
when peace between the two countries was threatened 
by the popular cry in the United States for a large 
part of the "Oregon Territory/' then claimed by 
Great Britain and now embraced in British Colum- 
bia. ^'Fifty-four forty or fight !'^ became the cam- 
paign cry of the party that elected Polk in 1844. 
When Polk became President, however, he illustrated 
again the principle that democratic governments may 
provide a check on a popular demand for war. The 
President did not translate the campaign slogan into 
action against Great Britain ; but, in accordance with 
the suggestion which had been previously made by 
President Tyler, he informed the British ambassador, 
Pakenham, that the forty-ninth parallel would make 
a satisfactory basis for settlement. Pakenham, how- 
ever, in a somewhat offensive reply, rejected this pro- 
posal. Thereupon, President Polk indicated very 



* Maine refused to discuss the very basis on which Webster 
proposed an agreement, but the latter showed the Governor of 
the State an old map which convinced the Governor that the 
British claims were very nearly justified. Webster promised 
not to show the map to Lord Ashburton. On the other hand, 
the British archives held the long-sought map used in the orig- 
inal negotiations of 1782, which confirmed the claims of the 
United States! 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 75 



clearly that the United States Government would not 
discuss the matter further, and called upon Congress 
to make preparations for sustaining these modified 
American claims in the Oregon region. Pakenham's 
refusal, however, was not upheld by the British Gov- 
ernment, and, in 1846, the boundary proposed by 
Presidents Polk and Tyler was, with some slight 
changes, accepted. Again Great Britain and the 
United States, in open, if not always amicable dis- 
cussion, showed the way for a settlement of interna- 
tional difficulties by peaceful methods rather than by 
an appeal to force. 

Opposition to illiberal or autocratic governments 
has been a characteristic of the Anglo-Celtic peoples. 
They have also sympathised with the people of other 
countries when they were struggling for greater free- 
dom and a larger measure of popular rights. This 
sympathy was perhaps more openly shown in America 
than in Britain, especially in the first half of the nine- 
teenth century. Popular sentiment was frequently 
reflected in Congress ; and the oft-declaimed speeches 
of Clay and Webster on behalf of the struggling 
Greeks are not the only official or semi-official evidence 
of the fact that America has ever been the friend as 
well as the hope of the oppressed. In equal measure, 
it may be said that autocracy has always feared the 
development and growing influence of democracy in 
America; for America first proved the worth of the 
principle that the State exists for the welfare of the 
people, in contradistinction to the autocratic doctrine 



76 



A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 



that the people exist for the welfare of the State.* 
In the decades which marked the various European 
struggles for popular liberty, America has welcomed, 
from Poland, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Rus- 
sia, those who have sought to overthrow an alien yoke, 
domestic autocracy, or the burden of militarism in 
all its forms. America welcomed the Polish patriot, 
Kosciusko; the Hungarian *' rebel," Louis Kossuth; 
and the German patriot, Carl Schurz, together with 
thousands of his fellow-countrymen who had struggled 



*Cf. James R. EandalPa 
eulogy of Henry Clay, 'Hlie 
spokesman of tlie free" in 
America and in Europe: — 

His trumpet-tones re-echoed 
like 
Evangels to the free. 
Where Chimborazo views a 
world 
Mosaic 'd in the sea; 
And his proud form shall 
stand erect 
In that triumphal car 
Which bears to the Valhalla 
gates 
Heroic Bolivar. 



He 



and 



spoke for Greece, 
freedom flew 
Along her sacred rills, 
Waking the mighty souls that 
slept 
On Marathonian hills; 
While bold Bozzaris launched 
his flag 
Upon the gulf of night, 
And hurled a living thunder- 
bolt 
Against the Ottomite! 



Cf., also. Lord Byron's 
"Translation of the War 
Song of the Greeks" in their 
fight against the Turk: — 

Sparta, Sparta, why in slum- 
bers 

Lethargic dost thou lie? 
Awake and join thy numbers 

With Athens, old ally! 
Leonidas recalling. 

That chief of ancient song, 
Who saved thee once from 
falling, 

The terrible! the strong! 
Who made that bold diversion 

In old Thermopylae 
And warring with the Persian 

To keep his country free; 
With his three hundred wag- 
ing 

The battle long he stood, 
And like a lion raging, 

Expired in seas of blood. 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 77 

in vain against the enveloping grasp of Prussian mili- 
tary autocracy. It has almost been forgotten that in 
1853, the year in which Perry opened the ports of 
Japan, the whole world was startled by the bold action 
of Captain D. N. Ingraham, another American naval 
officer, who was stationed in Mediterranean waters at 
Smyrna. Captain Ingraham learned from the Ameri- 
can consul that the commander of an Austrian squad- 
ron had seized, in Asia Minor, and was holding pris- 
oner, Martin Koszta, a compatriot of Kossuth. 
Koszta had taken out "first papers" in America pre- 
paratory to becoming a citizen of the United States. 
From on board the United States Sloop St. Louis, 
Captain Ingraham first courteously asked for the re- 
lease of Koszta. This was as curtly denied and the in- 
formation volunteered that Koszta would hang by 
morning. Ingraham did not waste further words with 
the representatives of Austrian autocracy; he tersely 
demanded that Koszta be turned over to him within a 
definite time or he would open fire. When the hour 
of the American commander's ultimatum had nearly 
expired, and Ingraham, with his decks cleared for ac- 
tion, was awaiting, watch in hand, the moment to 
fire, the haughty representatives of autocracy at last 
understood and Koszta was released.* 

Such deeds as this and the frequent popular demon- 
strations of American sympathy for "rebellious sub- 
jects" were not regarded with enthusiasm in Eu- 

* Arrangement was made for the transfer of Koszta to the 
care of the French Consul pending an examination into his 
claims of citizenship. 



78 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

ropean capitals; but Ingraham's bold challenge 
aroused a thrill of response wherever the spirit of de- 
mocracy found freedom for expression. The working- 
men of Great Britain, each contributing a penny, 
gave the American commander a silver chronometer; 
and German- Americans of Chicago, who had fled from 
the grinding military autocracy of the Fatherland, 
presented him with silver plate and a resolution ex- 
pressive of their appreciation of his act on behalf of 
one whom they regarded as a fellow patriot.* 

In regard to British policy, the principal misunder- 
standing extant in the minds of Americans of the 
present generation, irrespective of historical teaching, 
has been the attitude of the British Government to- 
wards the United States during the War of Secession. 
Any sense of grievance held by Americans on this 
score has comparatively little basis in actual fact, 
while the concessions made later by Great Britain to 
American opinion are among the most unusual ever 
yielded by any great power that was in a position to 
uphold its contentions. There are three matters of a 
political character, and an extra-political one, which 
have been widely referred to as instances of British 
unfriendliness in connection with Anglo-American re- 



* Prior to the Prussianisation of Germany under Hohen- 
zollern domination, Kant, Schiller, Heine, and Goethe spoke 
in behalf of liberty and political freedom. Goethe's expres- 
sion: ''Only he earns liberty who daily has to struggle for it," 
compares favorably with that of John Philpot Curran: ''The 
condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eter- 
nal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at 
once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his 
guilt.'' 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 79 



lations during the conflict for the preservation of the 
Union. 

First, it has been asserted that Great Britain was 
overhasty in recognising the Confederacy, as a de 
facto government ; for, at the time of this recognition, 
the Federal Government sought to represent the move- 
ment in the Southern States as an insurrection with- 
out established authority. Nevertheless, whatever the 
wishes of the Federal Government may have been, and 
however much based on shrewd political motives, it 
was clear that the movement in the South had out- 
grown the bounds of mere insurrection from the first. 
Besides being by its very nature unlike any struggle 
possible in Europe, there was no positive Constitu- 
tional prohibition against any State reassuming its 
complete sovereignty; on the contrary, it was widely 
believed and frequently announced (and denied) in 
every part of the Union that any State had the right 
to "resume its complete sovereignty." Instead of 
promptly moving to suppress the secession movement, 
the Federal Government, under two Presidents, had 
permitted, for a period of three months, the forma- 
tion of an independent Confederation to proceed with- 
out interference. The situation had no precedent, and 
has had no parallel since, unless possibly, the seces- 
sion of Panama from the union of the United States 
of Colombia be regarded as bearing some basis for 
comparison. In the case of the Confederacy, responsi- 
ble authority never ceased ; and, in the various States, 
the local government was not even changed. The se- 
ceding States voluntarily entered a new Union, which 



80 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

began at once to take up the powers of government 
delegated to it. When the Federal Government called 
on the loyal States to enforce its authority in the se- 
ceded States and to restore them to the Federal Union, 
a de facto Government had been in operation for sev- 
eral months, and was claiming de jure rights. Again, 
when the Federal Government declared a blockade of 
the South, it acknowledged the existence of an opposi- 
tion beyond the stage of an insurrection and it was 
so acknowledged by the Supreme Court of the United 
States. The Government of Great Britain in accept- 
ing and proclaiming the de facto status of the Con- 
federacy, merely forecast the subsequent decision of 
the highest legal tribunal of the United States. 

The demand of Great Britain for the return of 
the Confederate commissioners, Mason and Slidell, 
and for an apology for their seizure on board a Brit- 
ish vessel, occasioned the most violent anti-British 
demonstration. This affair presents the second note- 
worthy complaint against the British Government of 
this period. In the matter previously discussed, the 
United States Supreme Court upheld the correctness 
of the action of Great Britain. In this case. President 
Lincoln declared the act of Captain Wilkes indefensi- 
ble and exactly contrary to the contentions of America 
from the beginning concerning the alleged right of 
search and impressment, a "right'' which Great 
Britain had not exercised in practice for thirty-five 
years, and which she had formally and officially 
abandoned in theory a few years before the American 
conflict began. In the meantime, however, such was 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 81 



the hysterical state of public opinion that Congress 
was persuaded to extend to Captain Wilkes a vote of 
thanks and to present him with silver plate. If it he 
pointed out, therefore, that Great Britain began 
preparations for mobilising her military and naval 
forces, her action could not, under the circumstances, 
be considered hasty, or unnatural. When this inci- 
dent is looked at in the full light of the facts ; and it 
is, thanks chiefly to Lincoln, so regarded to-day, it 
should be remembered, in addition, that Mason and 
Slidell met with so cold a reception in London that the 
former made it a basis of complaint for the entire time 
he remained in England as the accredited represen- 
tative of the Confederacy. Neither he nor the officials 
of his Government received the recognition that both 
had fully expected to receive. Mason, therefore, as- 
sailed the attitude of the British Government as un- 
just or even hostile to the cause of the Confederacy.* 

The third charge against Great Britain for breaches 
in the friendly character of Anglo-American relations 
is embraced under the head of ''The Alabama 
Claims." The fact that the United States Govern- 
ment was awarded fifteen million, five hundred thou- 
sand dollars damages has been advanced as positive 
proof that Great Britain was guilty of grave offenses 
against international law and of ill-disguised official 
hostility to the Government of the United States. 

A complete investigation, however, of this third and 

* Slidell, on the other hand, met with secret encouragement 
at the French Court. Mason had been a United States Sena- 
tor from Virginia, while Slidell, although born in New York, 
had represented Louisiana in a similar capacity. 



82 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

"most flagrant" act of alleged unfriendliness on the 
part of Great Britain brings out the fact that so 
great was the desire of the representatives of that 
Government to preserve amicable relations with this 
country that an arbitration agreement was signed, 
under the terms of which an entirely new principle 
for damages by a belligerent against a neutral could 
be applied. Not only was one party (Great Britain) 
in this action voluntarily subjecting herself to ex post 
facto regulations — to rules established after the al- 
leged offence had been committed — but Great Britain 
ultimately submitted to the application of a ruling 
which leading legal authorities of the other litigant 
(the United States) declared, in the opinion of one of 
them, "had no precedent, and could have no follow- 
ing/' * 

By all precedent in international law and usage, 
Great Britain could not be held accountable for the 
depredations of the Alabama upon United States 

* These statements are based upon authorities on interna- 
tional law who wrote their opinions within a quarter of a cen- 
tury subsequent to the award of the Geneva Tribunal. It is 
not in any way contended that the Washington Treaty and the 
arbitration based upon its provisions have not affected political 
opinion and tendencies in international custom. 

' ' They [the rules laid down by the Geneva Tribunal] are not 
binding as permanent and absolute rules on England and the 
United States: (a) because neither England nor the United 
States have ever considered them to be so binding: and (b) 
because, by the treaty that proposed them as temporary rules 
of action for guidance of a special and exceptional court, their 
permanent adoption is dependent upon their communication 
to the great European powers, which communication has never 
been made. This position is taken by Mr. Fish in his letters 
to Sir Edward Thornton, of May 8 and September 18, 1876, 
as communicated by President Hayes in his message to the 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 83 

shipping. The Alabama set out from Liverpool as an 
unarmed vessel, which later, through private British 
sources, secured its equipment off the Azores. The ves- 
sel was constructed by contract with a private corpo- 
ration and might have been purchased with equal pro- 
priety by the Government of the United States instead 
of the Confederacy. The Government of the United 
States, however, was able to construct its own ships, 
while the Confederacy, as an acknowledged belliger- 
ent, presumably with equal rights, was compelled to 
purchase where it could in foreign markets.* 

The Government of the Confederate States, in con- 
tracting for the unarmed Alabama did not go so far 
as the Government of the United States had gone in 



Senate of January 13, 1879; and there is no dissent of the 
British Government recorded. '' 

— Wharton: A Digest of the International Law of the United 
States. Washington: Goveriiment Printing Office. 1886. 

"It will be at once seen that these rules, though leading 
immediately to an award superficially favorable to the United 
States in the large damages it gave, placed limitations on the 
rights of neutrals greater even than those England had en- 
deavoured to impose during the Napoleonic wars, and far 
greater than those which the United States had ever previously 
been willing to concede. 

' ' These rules, repudiated as tliey have been by the contracting 
powers, and rejected by all other powers, are to be regarded 
not only as not forming part of the law of nations, but as not 
binding either Great Britain or the United States." 
— Wharton: Com. Am. Law; 244. Cf., also, Creasy, Twiss, 
Wheaton, American Law Beview, VII. 

* Secretary Welles had tried to get armed and iron-plated 
ships from the same firm which constructed the Alabama; but 
the Federal Government, in the belief that the war would soon 
be over, specified that the vessels should be built within too 
brief a period for the Lairds — the designers of the Alabama — 
to undertake any promise of delivery. 



84 A HERITAGE OF FUEEBOM 

contracting for several vessels secured during the 
Revolution from France when France was neutral. 
On the other hand, thirty-odd years before the War 
of Secession, when the Spanish Government claimed 
damages for the depredations of the American-built 
Santissima Trinidad, which had been operating on be- 
half of the Argentina revolutionists, Mr. Justice 
Story handed down the decision of the United States 
Supreme Court to the effect that the United States 
could not be held responsible for the acts of that ves- 
sel after she had been properly commissioned by the 
belligerent in whose service she was duly engaged. 
Not only was the Santissima Trinidad built in the 
United states, but the Supreme Court admitted also 
that the vessel was equipped in the United States; 
that, with the '* expressed approval of the United 
States Government," she had visited, from time to 
time, United States ports to procure supplies; that 
her Argentine commission ''was not expressed in the 
most unequivocal terms," so that, with regard to her 
career, the vessel had to be judged partly by cir- 
cumstances and testimony; and that there was even 
a private suspicion of a ** lurking American interest" 
in the vessel itself.* 

* The Court affirmed in addition : * * A bill of sale is not 
necessary to be produced nor will the courts of a foreign 
country inquire into the means by which the title to the prop- 
erty has been acquired." The Santissimn Trinidad was but 
one of a number of ships which were built in the United 
States for service under the belligerent governments of South 
America. 

As Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams, Henry 
Clay wrote to Eivas y Salmon, June 9, 1827: '*If vessels have 
been built in the United States and afterwards sold to one of 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 85 

In spite of these facts, the Government of Great 
Britain, on the complaint of the United States, agreed 
to discuss the matter before an international tribunal 
on points which the United States Supreme Court had 
already declared most positively to be above question 
on the ground of ' ' the settled practice between na- 
tions. " By a special arrangement, therefore, the de- 
fendant (Great Britain) agreed to stand trial on 
charges, the validity of which the plaintiff (the 
United States) had previously refused to admit and 
afterwards refused to acknowledge as applicable to 
any future proceedings in which she might be a party. 

In the opinion of the Confederate Government, the 
British rulings and policy had markedly favoured the 
Federal belligerent. As an illustration, it may be 
cited that, according to the regulations laid down by 
the British Government, both belligerents were for- 
bidden to bring naval captures to British ports for 
adjudication by duly constituted prize courts. This 
ruling was apparently equitable ; but, in actual prac- 
tice, it was so distinctly favourable to the United 
States that it might have been promulgated from 
Washington rather than from London. From the be- 
ginning, the United States controlled the seas, so that 

the belligerents and converted into vessels-of-war, our citi- 
zens engaged in that species of manufacture have been equally 
ready to build and sell vessels to the other belligerent.^' On 
October 31, 1827, Clay wrote: *'To require the citizens of a 
neutral power to abstain from their incontestable right to 
dispose of the property which they must have in an unarmed 
ship to a belligerent, would, in effect, be to demand that they 
should cease to have any commerce, or to employ any naviga- 
tion in their intercourse with the belligerent." 



86 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

Federal prizes could be taken upon capture into any- 
port of the United States at any time. On the other 
hand, the ports of the Confederacy were blockaded. 
Therefore, the only profitable recourse left to Con- 
federate warships lay in taking their prizes into 
neutral ports for adjudication, a privilege which was 
denied them by Great Britain and by other neutrals 
that followed her example. This privilege had so 
long been extended to belligerents that it had become 
regarded almost as a right. From first to last, the 
Confederate authorities claimed that ''right," but in 
vain.* 

Again, it was decided that the war vessels of either 
belligerent could obtain coal and provisions at British 
ports. Such was the theory of the British ruling, but 
this privilege in several instances was denied to Con- 
federate warships. This was notably the ease at Gi- 
braltar. The Confederate warship Sumter was laid 
up there and sold, chiefly because Captain Semmes 
was unable to secure coal until after he was blockaded 
by a Federal squadron. Had he been able to get out 
with the Sumter on that occasion, the skill of this Con- 
federate naval officer might not have been available 
for the destructive career of the Alabama, of which 
he later became commander. One of the officers on 
the Alabama was Acting Master Bulloch of Georgia, 

* The facts here brought forward to show that Great Britain 
was not legally culpable in the matter of the Alabama claims 
must not be understood as impugning the testimony of the 
American Minister, Charles Francis Adams, who held that the 
British officials were lax in making inquiry as to the purposes 
of the vessel under construction. 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 87 



an uncle of Theodore Koosevelt. At one time or an- 
other, Bulloch, like the other Confederate officers un- 
der Semmes, complained of the official hostility of the 
British to the cause of the Confederacy ; and, in pass- 
ing judgment upon the actions of a neutral, the 
official attitude is all-important. 

With regard to private views or sentiment, it cannot 
successfully he denied that the larger number of the 
influential people of Great Britain were in sympathy 
with the Confederacy. This sympathy was partly 
sentimental, partly political. A large number of 
Britons engaged in commerce and manufacturing were 
not so much in favour of the independence of the 
Confederacy as they were opposed to the political 
policies of the United States. The South had long 
contended for low tariffs, or free trade, while the 
North had sought and obtained high tariffs. The 
Confederacy, therefore, promised a market for British 
manufactures ; the North would shut them out. The 
fact, also, that the South was the largest producer of 
cotton for the great British mills had considerable 
effect on British sentiment.* 

*In 1863, Henry Ward Beecher spoke at Liverpool in an 
effort to turn popular sentiment toward the Federal Govern- 
ment and the North. In the course of his address, he de- 
clared: *' There must be liberty to distribute and exchange 
^products of industry in any market without burdensome tar- 
iffs, without imposts, and without vexatious regulations. . . . 
The comprehensive law of ideal industrial conditions of the 
world is free manufacture and free trade." Mr. Beecher 
doubtless believed in the faith he here expressed, but his 
audience interrupted him with cries of "The Morrill Tariff! 
This tariff had just been passed by the Federal Congress at 
the behest of the Northern manufacturers and represented the 



t 



88 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

There was, on tlie other hand, a strong minority 
among the so-called "higher classes" in Britain who 
favoured the North. When, also, it seemed likely that, 
with the triumph of the North, all of the restored 
Union would follow the example set by some of the 
States and the British Empire in the abolition of 
slavery, even the involuntarily idle and suffering 
workingmen of the Lancashire mill districts declared 
themselves in favour of the Federal Government and 
cause.* 



highest barrier yet raised against British and other importa- 
tions. 

* There exists to-day a wide-spread popular impression that 
the principal issue at stake in the War of Secession was that 
of slavery ; in short, that the North fought to abolish it and the 
South to perpetuate it. The abolition of slavery, however, 
was an incidental outcome of the struggle, and it is often for- 
gotten how frequently President Lincoln stated that the war 
aims of the Federal Government were altogether involved in 
the preservation of the Union, whether **with or without 
slavery.*' The Emancipation Proclamation did not, in fact, 
free any slaves in the loyal States or in those parts of the 
South then under Federal authority. In 1864, Jefferson Davis 
prepared to send a commissioner to Europe offering to guar- 
antee the emancipation of the negroes in return for recogni- 
tion of the Confederacy. This proposition was placed before 
the Government of Great Britain; but Premier Palmerston re- 
plied that under no circumstances would her Majesty's Gov- 
ernment offer recognition to the Confederate States. On the 
other hand, there is little doubt that an autocracy or any gov- 
ernment hostile to the United States would have attempted to 
take advantage of any one of a number of opportunities to cut 
in two the power and territory of a commercial and political 
rival. The essential harmony of principles between the govern- 
ments of the United States and Great Britain prevented such 
an outcome. In somewhat similar fashion, the essential agree- 
ment of the political ideals of the people of the Northern and 
the Southern States led to a permanent and complete healing 
of the wounds of war just as soon thereafter as military recon- 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 89 

Throughout the past century of Anglo-American 
peace, no one would pretend to say that in favouring 
the United States, the Government of Great Britain 
was acting in a purely altruistic and unselfish man- 
ner. On the contrary, the liberal statesmen of Great 
Britain perceived that it was to the best interests of 
Great Britain to maintain friendly relations with the 
United States ; and this in turn, promoted the welfare 
of American democracy. Fewer statesmen in Amer- 
ica than in Britain saw or at least openly professed 
this view of mutual profit from mutual concessions. 
In Britain, whenever ultra-conservative leaders gained 
control, their natural coldness for the peculiar demo- 
cracy of the United States was as often tempered by 
the appearance of war clouds in Europe. For exam- 
ple, political disturbances of this nature materially 
aided in overcoming conservative opposition to dis- 
cussion and arbitration of the Alabama claims. 

Some twenty years later, or during President Cleve- 
land 's second administration, the sharp controversy 
which arose between the governments of the United 
States and Great Britain, voiced by Secretary Olney 
on the one side and Lord Salisbury on the other, not 
only caused no breach between the two great branches 
of Anglo- Celtic democracy, but the dispute had the 
ultimate effect of cementing the bonds of friendship 
and of laying a firmer basis for international peace. 
The discussion of the points at issue was frank and 
open, and the people of both nations became interested 

struction ended and the prmciples of self-government were 

restored. 



90 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

in working for a better understanding. They, at 
least, would not permit their duly elected representa- 
tives, or the jingo element, or the merely disaffected, 
to lead them into a conflict if it could honourably be 
avoided. At no time did the spirit of Anglo-Celtic 
democracy show to better advantage. The declaration 
of Secretary Olney, based, perhaps, on Senator Sum- 
ner's chauvinistic oratory of 1869, that, in effect, 
Great Britain had no established rights on the whole 
American Continent which the United States was 
bound to respect was, in American opinion, unten- 
able; although the special interest of the United 
States in Venezuela under the Monroe Doctrine was 
upheld and maintained. On the other hand, the peo- 
ple of Great Britain set themselves to smoothing over 
the brusque reply of their Premier, and the propriety 
of the inquiry of the United States Government into 
the relations between European Powers and the South 
American Eepublics was acknowledged. Both peo- 
ples, aroused by the belligerent tone of their elected 
representatives, felt a sudden sense of shock that such 
official action might at any time lead to a breach of an 
Anglo-American peace which had lasted through sev- 
eral generations.* 

* During the War of Secession and in the midst of a remark- 
able display of provincialism on the part of Senator Sumner 
and Secretary Seward, it is nowhere evident that Abraham 
Lincoln exliibited a wish for anything other than the most 
friendly relations with the British Government and people. 
Sumner, as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign 
Relations, made perhaps the most preposterous demands ever 
seriously proposed to a friendly nation. He estimated the 
Alabama claims and the damages due the United States by 
Great Britain on the basis of the Federal cost of maintenance 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 91 



The immediate effect of this dispute led, after fur- 
ther discussion, not only to its settlement by arbitra- 
tion ; but the two governments proceeded to seize the 
opportunity to adjust a number of other differences, 
some of them of long standing. Furthermore, a gen- 
eral treaty of arbitration was signed in Washington 
in January, 1897. This treaty was intended to cover 
any matters which should come up for controversy 
between the two great English-speaking peoples. The 
terms of the agreement met with the approval of 
leading statesmen in either country, but certain politi- 
cal influences were at work in the United States 
against its final ratification. These influences, to- 
gether with the traditional distrust of Great Britain, 
induced the United States Senate to reject the treaty; 
although, even in the face of violent opposition, rati- 
fication failed by a small margin on the required two- 
thirds majority.* 

It was during the Spanish- American war that tradi- 

of the War of Secession; and he expressed the belief that, 
under the circumstances, the British flag had best be with- 
drawn altogether from the North American continent. It is 
an hiteresting fact that John Hay, President Lincoln's private 
secretary and biographer, became Secretary of State^ under 
President McKinley. Had Lincoln been a leader of the type 
which has, from time to time, sought to create popular senti- 
ment against Great Britain, Hay's political inheritance would 
not have led him to further Jefferson's ideas of a cordial 
friendship" between Britain and America, which Hay did as 
far as lay in his power. 

* In the meantime. United States revenue cutters were seiz- 
inff British-owned sailing vessels in Bering Sea. This dispute 
alone might have brought the two nations to blows. It also 
was settled by arbitration, as in the case of a Canadian lish- 
eries difference at about the same period. 



92 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

tional distrust of the British Government and people 
received the severest blow of the nineteenth century. 
In striking contrast to the strongly-expressed con- 
demnation of the autocracies of Europe, together with 
the disapproval of republican France, the people of 
Great Britain, through their Press and government 
officials, endorsed America's determination to set 
Cuba free from misrule and despotism. The liberal 
attitude of Great Britain in 1823 had aroused no 
such popular response as this unexpected evidence of 
British sympathy with the latest aspirations of Amer- 
ican democracy. The position or viewpoint of the 
British Government was specifically illustrated by the 
now-famous ' incident at Manila Bay, wherein the 
American commander, disturbed by the dubious and 
high-handed actions of the commander of a powerful 
German fleet, received prompt assurances of support 
from the British naval forces.* 

* It is more than likely that some of the American officers 
at Manila remembered at that time the incident at Samoa ten 
years before when the German consul there had set up his own 
seleetion as king of the island. The German naval forces at 
Samoa began to take an active part against the deposed ruler, 
who had been friendly to American interests. Accordingly, 
the Adler was despatched to shell a village, the people of which 
had declared in favour of the former king. The plans of the 
Adler were upset by the appearance of the American cruiser 
Adams under Commander Leary. This American sailor of 
Irish descent did not intend that the friends of the United 
States should be fired upon without protest. He therefore put 
the Adams in line of the Adler 's fire and made ready for 
active participation in any proceedings that might follow. 
The commander of the Adler was not prepared to shell a 
United States cruiser, so that he abandoned his plans and re- 
turned to Apia. This action of Commander Leary at Samoa 
might well be compared with that of Captain Ingraham at 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 93 

The decade following the war with Spain showed a 
great increase of sympathy hetween well-informed 
Americans on the one side and liberal Britons on the 
other. Statesmen, diplomats, and writers, like Hay, 
Root, Choate, Grey, Bryce, and Pauncefote, took ad- 
vantage of the newly-aroused feeling of kinship in 
political ideals to settle several points of difference. 
By the purchase of Alaska in 1867, the already vast 
^xtent of boundary line between the United States 
and Canada had been about doubled. The claims of 
the two countries differed widely; but there was no 
hasty call to arms, no rush by either people to possess 
the territory in dispute, and there were no political 
outcries as in the ** roaring forties." Moreover, the 

Smyrna. Cf. p. 77. Commander Leary's course in this whole 
diflSeult and dangerous proceeding at Samoa constitutes a brief 
but highly creditable chapter in American naval records. Part 
of his note to the commander of the Adler, as the latter was 
arrogantly preparing to attack the natives and risk also the 
destruction of American lives and property, should inspire a 
thrill of pride in his fellow-countrymen for all time. In 
reference to his countrymen's rights and interests, Commander 
Leary declared, as he placed himself between the German and 
his prospective victims: *'/ am here for the purpose of pro- 
tecting the same.'* 

The democracy of Great Britain was, for a long time, ac- 
cused of the apparent inconsistency of holding the people of 
India and other semi-developed countries in a kind of tutelage. 
It is for this reason, perhaps, that the people of Great Britain 
regarded the acquisition of the Philippines by the United 
States with especial satisfaction. The British people did not 
envy the American Republic any such acquisitions. On the 
contrary, they wanted a fellow-democracy to share in some of 
the grave responsibilities which had, in many cases, been 
thrust upon them. A greater similarity in policy and destiny 
brought about a mutual sympathy in common problems. Presi- 
dent McKinley's expressions as to ''benevolent assimilation," 
aroused far more unfavourable criticism in America than they 
did in England. 



A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 



English-speaking democracies had begun to feel that 
they had formed a habit of settling all differences 
through bi-national discussion or by arbitration. The 
decisions of the tribunals of arbitration were accepted 
in good temper by both sides in a manner not unlike 
that in which parties to controversies in the United 
States have come to accept the decisions of the United 
States Supreme Court. 

During Roosevelt's administration, Elihu Root, as 
the American Secretary of State, and Ambassador 
Bryce on the part of Great Britain, signed (April 8, 
1908) an arbitration convention which ultimately suc- 
ceeded in securing the approval of the United States 
Senate. It was not so comprehensive an agreement as 
that proposed by Olney and Pauncefote, but it served, 
almost immediately, a beneficent purpose. The dis- 
pute as to the Canadian fisheries was referred to the 
Hague Tribunal, with the result that this century-old 
difficulty was adjusted to the relief of the people of 
both nations. 

Last to be mentioned here, but by no means the 
least important of the discussions with 'Great Britain, 
is that relating to the construction of the Panama 
Canal. In the Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850, the 
United States and Great Britain had agreed to joint 
control of any inter-oceanic waterway which might 
be constructed in Central America. In the course of 
the vast development of the interests of the United 
States, the idea of the proposed joint control of an 
American project had become intolerable to American 
sentiment. It was thought that no canal was prefer- 



ANGLO-AMERICAN AGREEMENTS 95 

able to a canal not exclusively under American con- 
trol. It was so represented to Great Britain; and 
British statesmen, in the interests of world trade, 
agreed to give up British rights, as defined under the 
original treaty. Consequently, the Hay-Pauncefote 
agreement of 1901 superseded the Clayton-Bulwer 
treaty of 1850. By the terms of this agreement, 
Great Britain withdrew from participation in the con- 
struction and control of the canal. The United States 
proceeded to act with complete freedom and the Fed- 
eral Government agreed to stand sponsor for the 
neutralisation of the waterway when finished. This 
bi-national discussion, the British concessions, and the 
agreement flowing therefrom are not only highly 
creditable to the open diplomacy of the two Powers, 
but their joint action has already served and will con- 
tinue to serve the trade and commerce of all the world. 
The English-speaking democracies constitute the ex- 
pansion of the liberty-loving Anglo-Celtic race. They 
consist of two great divisions and seven separate peo- 
ples : the United States, with its dependencies, on the 
one side ; and Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New 
Zealand, South Africa, and the British Isles, with 
their dependencies, on the other. To-day, over-proud 
Britons on the one hand and over-boastful Americans 
on the other may not like the idea of learning from 
each other how one has excelled the other in working 
out different phases of their Anglo-Celtic political 
ideals, yet each may profit by the achievements and 
avoid the mistakes of the other ; and both have lessons 
to learn from the separate democracies of five other 



96 A HERITAGE OF FEEEDOM 

English-speaking peoples whose principles of political 
liberty may be traced to the same source. Whatever 
menaces the democracy of one of the seven English- 
speaking peoples menaces democracy the world over; 
and whatever tends to strengthen the peaceful demo- 
cracy of one or more of these peoples tends to promote 
the welfare of popular government everywhere. Be- 
tween the two great branches of the English-speaking 
peoples a beneficent peace has prevailed for over one 
hundred years. In view of the world-conflict between 
the forces of autocracy and democracy to-day, we be- 
gin to realise for the first time, that had a mere tradi- 
tional distrust, engendered by historical misconcep- 
tions, fanned Anglo-American political differences 
into a doubly disastrous conflict, government of the 
people, by the people, and for the people might in- 
deed have perished from the earth. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUGGESTIONS 

The foregoing pages liave treated an historical sub- 
ject in a manner rather less **technicar' than *' popu- 
lar." Nevertheless, in this work, also, particularly if 
it offer a more or less unaccustomed viewpoint or in- 
terpretation, the reader will desire either to know the 
sources of the writer's information or to have sugges- 
tions made showing where he may read further on the 
subject. Perhaps he may wish to do both. But the 
author who conscientiously wishes to help his readers 
faces a difficult problem in the kind of bibliography 
he shall present. It is comparatively easy to mention 
from the library catalog approximately all the books 
which bear upon the subject. The author is relieved 
thereby of the responsibility of selection, but the 
reader is perplexed — and perhaps both discouraged 
and disgusted. 

On the beginnings of America, works of a readily 
accessible and popular nature are yet to appear, and 
there are few even of the ''technical" volumes which 
do not have to be revised in the light of new evidence 
on this period of the parentage and birth of Anglo- 
American democracy. Captain John Smith's works, 
as histories of the founding of the Jamestown colony, 
are thoroughly unreliable. On the other hand, a large 
number of the records of the colonists and the parent 
company have been gathered and published by Alex- 

97 



98 A HERITAGE OF FREEDOM 

ander Brown in two volumes, entitled : The Genesis of 
the United States. The same author brought out also 
The First Bepuhlic in America and English Politics 
in Early Virginia History. See also Tyler's England 
in America.* 

After the period of the "parentage and birth" of 
Anglo-American colonisation, we have Governor Brad- 
ford 's veracious chronicle of the beginnings of the 
Massachusetts settlement. From this point on, the 
authorities multiply and the matter of selection be- 
comes a difficult one. If the three volumes of Profes- 
sor Osgood's American Colonies in the Seventeenth 
Century seem too formidable, there are other presenta- 
tions in single volumes or in portions of some of the 
volumes edited or prepared by Johnson, Hart, Avery 
(popular), Wiley and Rines (popular with frequent 
documentary reprints for reference), etc., etc. 

These general authorities could be multiplied al- 
most ad infinitum. For the later periods, the reader 
will be more interested in the works which he would 
care to follow in the development of the broader, non- 
provincial viewpoint of British-American and other 
international relations touched upon in the foregoing 
pages. Such are, for example, the valuable contribu- 
tions of George Louis Beer: Origins of the British 
Colonial System, British Colonial Policy, The Old 
Colonial System, The English-speaking Peoples. Syd- 

* As a late and admirable addition to the limited number of re- 
liable volumes based on the "popular records of our first colony" 
should be mentioned Professor Charles Mills Gayley's brief vol- 
ume on Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America — 
which appeared after the foregoing pages had been written. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUGGESTIONS 99 



ney George Fisher: The True History of the Amer- 
ican Revolution, The Struggle for American Inde- 
pendence. Dunning: The British Empire and the 
United States. Charles Francis Adams : Transatlan- 
tic Historical Solidarity. Kennedy: The Pan-An- 
gles. Curtis: The Problem of the Commonwealth, 
The CommOTiwealth of Nations. Powers: America 
Among the Nations. Robinson and West: The For- 
eign Policy of Woodrow Wilson. For brief and read- 
able comparative study, see Bacon's The American 
Plan of Government, and Wallace's The Government 
of England. 

Innumerable other volumes of general or particular 
value might be mentioned. This partial selection has, 
no doubt, wrought an injustice to other equally ad- 
mirable works. In the very nature of the attempt, 
however, such an injustice is inevitable. A few other 
volumes have been mentioned in preceding footnote 
references; and it should be added that any modern 
single volume history of the United States will furnish 
a more or less lengthy list of authorities and sources. 
These lists are incomplete, however comprehensive; 
for it is the latest volumes which have taken the most 
advantage of the more recent investigations, and the 
interpretation which may be put upon them. 



APPENDIX 

While the foregoing work was in press, several ad- 
ditional communications were received from historians 
to whom copies of the MS. had been sent. One of 
these letters was from Dr. Charles M. Andrews, Profes- 
sor of American History at Yale University. Professor 
Andrews warns the author against a possible impres- 
sion which may be created in regard to the relative 
value of the terms *' liberty" and *' democracy'' as 
used in the seventeenth century and that implied by 
such terms to-day. 

The author has assumed, however, that the reading 
public is familiar with the gradual development of 
representative democracy and that they would not in- 
terpret the ideals of Sir Edwin Sandys in framing 
the "Great American Charter of Liberty" of 1609 as 
extending, for example, the principles of universal 
suffrage to the settlements in America. It is not in- 
tended, of course, that there should be presented an 
''antithesis of democracy versus despotism" between 
the ideas of Sandys and the Smith faction in the Vir- 
ginia Company. Nevertheless, James I referred to 
Sandys as ^^our greatest enemy." The king arbitra- 
rily imprisoned Sandys and (doubtless) would have 
deemed it a duty to "divine right" principles to have 
hanged Sir Edwin, thus making the difference between 
their views of government one of life and death ! 

101 



102 APPENDIX 

The foregoing may, therefore, be profitably read in 
connection with the following statements set forth by 
Mr. A. F. Pollard, called by Professor Andrews in his 
letter, ' ' one of the sanest of English historical men, ' ' 
and in connection with similar comments made by 
Professor Andrews himself. 

Mr. Pollard writes in the Yale Beview for July, 
1914: 

* * This incessant change in man 's conceptions is the 
greatest problem of history. If only we knew exactly 
what men meant by the words they used, our difficulty 
in comprehending their actions would largely disap- 
pear; but it is surely obvious that the worst way of 
seeking an approach to that understanding is to as- 
sume that words meant in the past what they mean 
to-day.'' 

In the issue of the Yale Beview for October, 1914, 
Professor Andrews writes : 

' ' In truth, we have arrived at this idea of what our 
forefathers thought, by selecting certain documents 
and incidents, from the Mayflower Compact to the 
Declaration of Independence, and from Bacon's Re- 
bellion to the various riotous acts of the pre-Revolu- 
tionary period ; and, construing them more or less ac- 
cording to our wishes and prepossessions, have 
wrought therefrom an epic of patriotism satisfying to 
our self-esteem. We love to praise those who strug- 
gled, sometimes with high purposes, sometimes under 
the influence of purely selfish motives, against the au- 
thority of the British crown. But this, in an histori- 
cal sense, is pure pragmatism. It is not history, be- 



APPENDIX 103 

cause it treats only a part of the subject and treats it 
wrongly and with a manifest bias. It does not deal 
with what may be called the normal conditions of the 
colonial period. It ignores the prevailing sentiment 
of those who, however often they may have objected 
to the way in which the royal authority was exercised 
and to the men who exercised it, lived contented lives, 
satisfied in the main with the conditions surrounding 
them, and believing firmly in the system of govern- 
ment under which they had been born and brought 
up. It misunderstands and consequently exaggerates 
expressions of radical sentiment, and interprets such 
terms as * * freedom, " ' ' liberty, ' ' and ' ' independence ' ' 
as if, in the mouths of those who used them, they had 
but a single meaning and that meaning the one com- 
monly prevalent at the present time. 



INDEX 



Adams, Charles Francis, Min- 
ister to England, 86 fn. 

Adams, Charles Francis, II, 
49 fn., 99 

Adams, John, 18, 48, 55 fn. 

Adams, John Quincy, 84 fn. 

Adventure, The Sea, 25 

Agreements, 'Anglo-American, 

. 70 et seq. 

Alabama claims, 81-85 

Alaska, boundary dispute, 93 

Aldersgate, 17, 18, 43 

Alexander, Czar of Eussia, 63, 
64 

Alliance, The Holy, 62-68 

Altschul, on The Americavi 
devolution in our School 
Text-hooJcs, 46 fn., 48 fn. 

America, refuge against op- 
pression, 76 et seq. 

Anglo-American ideals, 47 ; 
popular unity, 46 

Anglo-Celtic, use of term, 
45 fn. 

Anglo-Saxon, use"^ of term, 
45 fn. 

Arbitration, Anglo-American, 
70 et seq. 

Arbuthnot-Ambrister contro- 
versy, 60-61 

Archer, Captain Gabriel, visits 
England, 20; opposes Col- 
onial Parliament, 20 

Ashburton, Lord, 73-74 

Assembly, first representative, 
29 

Austria, part in Holy Alli- 
ance, 62-68 



B 



Bacon, Sir Francis, draws up 
Charter of 1609, 22; of 
1612, 28 

Baltimore, in War of 1812, 59 

Barre, 48 

Beeeher, Henry Ward, at Liv- 
erpool, 87 f n. 

Beer, George Louis, 49 fn., 98 

Bering Sea controversy, 91 fn. 

Berkeley, Governor, 44 

Bermudas, 25-27 

Bethmann-Holweg, on viola- 
tion of Belgian neutrality, 
41 fn. 

Bible, Olustration of * ' the five 
talents," 35, 36 fn.; text 
from, 17, 18, 26 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 54-57 

Bradford, Governor, history 
of Plymouth settlement, 98; 
on communism, 37 fn. 

Brewster, William, 41 

Brown, Alexander, 98 

Bryce, James, signs arbitra- 
tion convention, 93-94 

Buck, Kev. Eichard, 26 

Burke, Edmund, on Concilia- 
tion, 46, 48 

Business, men of, interest in 
history, 49 f n. 

Butler, Nathaniel, 30 fn., 34 

Byron, on Greek freedom, 
76 fn. 







Canada, relations with United 
States, 58, 59, 71 



105 



106 



INDEX 



Canning, George, 66 

Carolinas, founding of, 44 

Caroline, the, incident of, 71 

Celt, the influence of the, 
45 f n. 

Charles I ascends throne, 40; 
overthrown, 44 

Charter of 1612, 27, 28 

Charters, operation of, 26, 39; 
secured, 19, 20, 22 

Clay, Henry, opinion as to 
Santissima Trinidad case, 
84 fn.; upholds liberty, 75- 
76 

Cleveland, President, in Vene- 
zuela controversy, 89-91 

College, the first, 38 

Colonies, difficulties of, 35 et 
seq.; support of, 20 

Commonwealth, British, com- 
ponent parts, XI, 95 

Communism at Jamestown and 
Plymouth, 37 fn. 

Company, Virginia (see Vir- 
ginia Company) 

Confederacy, the Southern, 
Commissioners of, to Brit- 
ain, seized, 80-81; recogni- 
tion of as belligerent, 79 et 
seq.; status of, 79-80 

Cromwell, Oliver, 18 

CromweU, Sir Oliver, 24 

Cuba, War for liberation of, 
91-93 

Curran, John Philpot, on lib- 
erty, 78 fn. 

Curtis, Lionel, 99 



D 



Declaration of Independence, 
53 fn.; original draft, XI; 
quotation from, 22 fn. 

Democracy, representative, de- 
velopment of, 35 et seq. 

Discussions, international, 721 
et seq. 



Divine Eule, dogma of, atti- 
tude towards, Charles I, 45; 
George III, 49; held by 
James I, 17, 30 fn. ; by Wil- 
liam II of Germany, 18 fn., 
30 fn.; overthrown in Eng- 
land, 44 

Doctrine, Monroe, apparently 
threatened, 70, 89-91; ori- 
gin of, 66-69 

Drayton, Michael, poem of, 
26 fn. 

Dunning^ William A., 99 

E 

Education, early, 38 

Emancipation Proclamation, 
effect of, 88 fn. 

England, debt to, as mother 
country, 48 

Experiment, Greatest Politi- 
cal, 19, 43 

F 

Fairfax, Lord, 51 

Falsifications of history con- 
cerning first colony, 28 fn., 
30 fn., 36 fn., 34, 36, 39 

Fatherland, term used, 45 fn. 

Fever, malarial, 35 

Fisheries, Canadian, 94 

Fisher, Sydney George, 49 fn., 
99 

France, 53; restored to Bour- 
bons, 62 

Francis, Emperor of Austria, 
63-64 

Frederick the Great, views of 
treaties, 42 f n. 

Frederick William, King of 
Prussia, 63-64 

G 

Gates, Governor, of Virginia, 

wreck of, 25, 26 
Gayley, Professor Charles 

Mills, 98 fn. 



INDEX 



107 



George IV, King of England, 
63 

George III, personal govern- 
ment of, X, 50 

Germany, attitude at Manila, 
92; at Samoa, 92 fn.; Prus- 
sianised, 76, 78 fn. 

Ghent, Treaty of, 58 

Goethe, expression on liberty, 
78 f n. 

Gondomar, Count, compared 
with Luxberg, 30 f n. ; op- 
poses English colonisation, 
29 

Goshen, Sir Edwin, on viola- 
tion of Belgian neutrality, 
41 fn. 

H 

Hague, Tribunal, the, 94 

Hampden, 18 

Harvard College, establish- 
ment of, 38 

Harvey, Sir John, deposed as 
Governor in Virginia, 44; 
visits Virginia, 39 

Hay, John, attitude towards 
Great Britain, 90 fn., 93 

Heine, 78 fn. 

Historical misconceptions in 
regard to American Eevolu- 
tion, 48-53; British- Ameri- 
can relations, 54 et seq. ; 
John Smith and the Vir- 
ginia Colony, 20, 23, 28 fn., 
30, 36; Thomas Jefferson, 
53 fn., 55 fn. 

History, falsification of, 34, 
36; falsified concerning 
first American Colony, 
28 fn., 30 fn., 36 f n. ; great- 
er popular interest in, 
49 f n. ; provincial interpre- 
tation of, in America, 
49 f n. ; the New, defined, 
23 

Hobart, Sir Henry, 22, 28 



Hohenzollern, domination of 
Prussia, 76, 78 f n. 

Hopkins, Oceanus, born, 27; 
Stephen, Pilgrim Father at 
Jamestown, 27 

Huddleston, Capt. John, car- 
ries aid from Jamestown to 
Pilgrims, 38 fn. 



Independence, Declaration of, 
53 f n. ; original draft, XI. 

Ingraham, Capt., rescues Kos- 
zta, 77; rewarded by Brit- 
ish workingmen and Ger- 
man-Americans, 78 

Impressment of sailors, 56 



Jackson, Andrew, at New Or- 
leans, 59; in Florida, 60- 
61; in regard to Maine 
boundary, 73 f n. 

James I, absolutism of, 21, 
29, 30; at Aldersgate, 17; 
death of, 38; denounces 
Sandys, 19, 47-48; divine 
rule, 17, 30, 32; falsifica- 
tions of history, 30, 36, 39 

Jameson, Dr. J. Franklin, on 
Smith 's history, 28 fn. 

Jamestown, first form of Gov- 
ernment, 20; founded, 19; 
sends aid to Plymouth set- 
tlement, 38 fn. 

Japan visited by Perry, 77 

Jefferson, Thomas, Anglo-Cel- 
tic origin, 45 f n. ; attitude 
towards England and Holy 
Alliance, 66-68; attitude to- 
wards Non-importation Acts 
and Barbary Powers, 55 f n. ; 
in original draft of Decla- 
ration, XI; on origin of 
American Kevolution,22 fn.; 
world dream of liberty, 65 



108 



INDEX 



K 

Kant, 78 fn. 
Kennedy, Sinclair, 99 
Kosciusko, 76 
Kossuth, 76 

Koszta, Martin, seized by 
Austria, 77 

L 

Leary, Commander, at Samoa, 
92 fn. 

Locke, John, 44 

London Company (see Vir- 
ginia Company) 

Louisiana Purchase, IX 

Loyalists, British, 59 

Luxberg, Count, 30 fn. 

M 

Madison, James, attitude to- 
wards England and Holy 
Alliance, 66 

Maine, boundary dispute, 72, 
73 

Martin, Capt. John, Colonist, 
26, 27 

Maryland, Founding of, 43 

Mason and Slidell incident, 
80-81 

Mason, James M., Confederate 
commissioner, seized, 80 ; 
complains of British hostil- 
ity, 81 

Massachusetts and Maine 
boundary dispute, 72, 73; 
opposes annexation of 
Texas, 70; settlement of, 
38 et seq, 

Middleton, Thomas, drama 
suppressed, 29 fn. 

Militarism, avoided in Amer- 
ica, 58; European, 76 

Misconceptions, historical, in 
regard to American Eevolu- 
tion, 49-53 ; British- Ameri- 
can relations, 54 et seq.; 



British attitude in War of 
Secession, 78-88 ; John 
Smith and Virginia Colony, 
20, 23, 28 fn., 30, 36; 
Thomas Jefferson, 53 fn., 
55 f n. ; popular in regard to 
slavery, 88 fn. 

Misunderstandings, political, 
XII 

Monroe Doctrine, in Venezuela 
controversy, 89-91; origin 
of, 66-69 

Monroe, James, attitude to- 
wards Holy Alliance, 66; 
promulgates the Monroe 
Doctrine, 69 

Mother Country, term used, 
46 fn., 48 fn. 

N 

Netherlands, connection with 

Jamestown, 27; liberation 

of, 22, 23 
New England, opposition to 

Stuart autocracy, 44 
New Orleans, Battle of, and 

effects, 59-60 
New York, founding of, 43 
Non-Importation Acts, 55 fn. 
Nullification, 73 

O 

Olney, Secretary, 89-91 
Oregon, boundary dispute, 71- 

75 
Osgood, Professor, 98 



Panama Canal, international 
agreement concerning, 94- 
95 

Parliament, first Colonial, pro- 
posed (see also Assembly), 
20 

Patriot Party, political de- 
scendants of in America, 



INDEX 



109 



47-48; purposes of, 34 et 
seq.; views of government, 
21, 22 

Peace, Anglo-American, 58 et 
seq.; Canada-United States, 
IX et seq., 58 

Penn, William, 43 

Pennsylvania, founding of, 43 

Percy, Capt. George, 26 

Philippines, British attitude 
towards acquisition of, 
92 fn. 

Philip II, autocratic dream of, 
62, 65 

Philip III, recognises the 
Netherlands, 22 

Pilgrims establish colony in 
America, 38-43; profit by 
Virginia precedents, 36 f n. ; 
refuse John Smith's offer, 
37 fn. 

Pitt, William, 48 

Plague, the Great, 35 

Plattsburg, in War of 1812, 
59 

Plymouth Colony, abandons 
communism, 37 fn.; debt to 
Sir Edwin Sandys, 40 et 
seq.; established in Amer- 
ica, 38-43; refuses Smith's 
offer, 37 fn. 

Pocahontas, 27 

Poland, 62 

Polk, President, 74-75 

Prussia, part in Holy Alli- 
ance, 62-68 

Purchase, Louisiana, IX 

Purchas, Eev. Samuel, 28 f n., 
34 

R 

Eandall, James R., on Henry 

Clay, 76 fn. 
Eatcliffe, Captain John, visits 

England, 20 
Rebellion, the Great (1642), 

44, 45 



Relations, British-American, 
54 et seq. ; British- American 
as affected by European 
situations, 89 

Restoration, the (1660), 45 

Revolution, American, British 
attitude towards, 50-52 ; 
nature of, 49, 50 ; origin of, 
23 f n. ; popular attitude to- 
wards, 51; results of, 52 

Revolution, England (1688), 
45 

Rhode Island, founding of, 
43 

Rider, Edward, quotation 
from, 20 fn. 

Robinson, John, 41 

Roosevelt, Theodore, 87; ad- 
ministration of, 94 ; Panama 
canal settlement, 94-95 

Root, Elihu, signs arbitration 
convention, 94 

Rolfe, John, 27 

Russia, part in Holy Alliance, 
62-68 



S 



Salisbury, Lord, 89-91 

Sandys, Sir Edwin, Anglo-Cel- 
tic origin, 45 f n. ; arrest of, 
32 fn.; as patron of Ply- 
mouth colony, 39-43; asso- 
ciates of, 18, 24; denounced 
by James I, 19, 47-48; 
drafts charter of 1609, 22; 
* ^ Leading Liberal, " 24 ; 
purposes charter of 1612, 
28; views of political devel- 
opment, 43 

Santissima Trinidad, 84 

Schiller, 78 fn. 

School, first free, 38 

Schurz, Carl, 76 

Self-government, development 
of, 47 

Shakespeare, Anglo-Celtie ori- 



110 



INDEX 



gin, 45 f n, ; associate of 
Sandys, 24 ; * * Shakespeare 
and the Founders of Lib- 
erty in America, ' ' 98 f n. 

Slavery, abolition of, in rela- 
tion to British attitude in 
War of Secession, 88 ; popu- 
lar misconception of, 88 fn. 

Slidell, Confederate Commis- 
sioner to France, 80-81 

Smith, Capt. John, conspiracy 
of, 37 f n. ; falsification of 
history, 34, 36; offer to 
Pilgrims, 37 fn.; opposed to 
Patriot Party, 24; sketch 
of, 36 fn.; ''True Eela- 
tion" of Virginia, 28 fn. 

Smith, Sir Thomas, 39 fn. 

Spain, attempts colony in Vir- 
ginia, 36 fn.; objects to 
English colonisation, 21, 
29 ; part in Holy Alliance, 
63-68; War with, 91-93 

Somers, Admiral, wreck of, 25 

South America establishes 
freedom, 63-68 

Southampton, Earl of, arrest 
of, 32 fn. ; friend of Shake- 
speare, 24 

Sumner, Secretary, demands 
upon British Government, 
90 fn. 

Sumter, the, at Gibraltar, 86 

Switzerland, 62 



Talents, reference to parable 

of, 35, 36 fn. 
Tariff, high, in relation to 

British attitude in War of 

Secession, 87 
Tempest, The, 25 
Teuton United with Celt, 

45 fn. 
Texas, Republic of, seeks al- 



liance with United States, 

70 
Thorpe, George, 38 fn. 
Trade, American, Colonial, 50, 

52 
Trade Laws, 47 
Treaties, Anglo-American, 54 
Treaty, Clayton-Bulwer, 94 ; 

Hay-Pauncef ote, 95 ; of 

Ghent, 58; Webster- Ashbur- 

ton, 73 
Tribunal, Geneva, 82 fn. 
Tryon, Governor, 44 
Tyler, Lyon G., 98 
Tyler, President, 74-75 



Venezuela controversy, 89-91 
Virginia Company denounced, 

29; dissolution of, 28-32; 

incorporation of, 20 

W 

War of 1812, 54, 57; of Se- 
cession, British attitude to- 
wards, 78-88 

Washington, George, XI ; 
Founder of British Com- 
monwealth, XI 

Webster, Daniel, conducts 
treaty, 73-75 ; upholds 
Greek liberty, 75 

William II, at Koenigsberg, 
18 f n. ; divine rule, 30 f r. 

Williams, Roger, 43 

Wilkes, Captain, 80 

Wilson, Woodrow, on Declara- 
tion of Independence, 64 fn. 

Wriothesley, Henry and 
Thomas, friends of Shake- 
speare, 24 and f n. 



Yeardley, Captain George, 27 



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